Ali Carter exclusive: I nearly quit snooker last year... now I want to be world champion

Carter, 43, has had a stellar career. He reached two World Championship finals, in 2008 and 2012, won a number of high profile events and was at one time a permanent fixture in the world's top 16. But in more recent times, he had fallen out of the elite and was without a tournament victory since 2016. And the Englishman clearly did believe his days in the game might be numbered.

Asked whether he had considered giving up snooker, Carter told Sporting Life: "Oh definitely. I spoke to a good friend of mine Mike Rowland, who owns the Andrewsfield flying school. I said, I've had enough of this snooker lark, defeats hurt big time and I'm just punch drunk with it. I've just had enough of it and I'll go and do something else. I might train and be a commercial pilot.

"He said, ‘mate, you're best on the snooker table, you're still good enough to win, you're still good enough to earn a lot of money’. He told me that I didn't want to be starting at the beginning in an aviation career at my age, there was plenty of time for that. I was 43, ranked about 20 in the world and as he said, I was only at 40 per cent power.

"He said to me, ‘If you can up it to 70 per cent power, let’s see what we can get out of it. You're never going to be 100 per cent with the snooker, down the club eight hours a day, with everything else you've got going on in your life. But if you apply yourself a little bit more, let's see’."

Carter revitalised by coaching switch

As it happens, Carter’s 2022/23 campaign has been a terrific one, featuring his first ranking title victory for seven years at the German Masters. He’s had plenty of fine runs elsewhere, including all the way to the Players Championship final. And he’ll head to the Crucible as a fully paid-up member of the world’s top 16 again.

Carter, who has at times been highly critical of his own mentality in the past, believes much of the credit for his resurgence must go to coach Chris Henry.

"He's made a massive difference to me, he has transformed me really," Carter said. "I was doing the same old things and I'd gone stale as a player. Bringing Chris in has reinvigorated me.

"I did work with him before the lockdown, just before I got to the final of the Masters and lost to Stuart Bingham. Then the lockdown happened. It was tough to keep up the momentum and it sort of stalled. I started working with Chris again in September or October time and it's been a transformation.

"Part of his business is about rewiring your brain, to fire positive thoughts rather than negative. He has explained that if you get yourself frustrated and worked up and angry like I have been in the past, that hinders your chance of performing at your best level. You're only making things more difficult for yourself. You’re stopping your brain from communicating with your body when you’re in a state of stress.

"The game is hard enough as it is without getting yourself at it. To a certain extent, it is good for me to get fired up. That's the sort of character I am. But you've got to keep a lid on it. You've got to stop the pot from boiling over, you want to have it simmering.

"There are lots of things in our lives that can make the pot boil over. We're all human. You see it with tennis players, you see it with footballers. Occasionally the pot does boil over. Some people are better at keeping a lid on it than others. I'm certainly learning to keep a lid on it to a better level than I have in the past.

"I think I've still got some more to go, I think I'm probably 60 per cent there with the mental side, of not getting frustrated with myself when I don't perform or when things go wrong. There's still work to be done there definitely. If there's work to be done and I think I can still improve – when I'm now up to five or six on the one year list and 11 or 12 on the two year list – then the next four or five years can be really interesting if I continue to apply myself."

Carter showed signs that he was returning to good form when he reached the semi-finals of the European Masters in August and quarter-finals of the English Open just before Christmas. Both times he was knocked out by the eventual tournament winner, Kyren Wilson and Mark Selby respectively.

Then came his long awaited return to the winner's circle in February, with a comfortable 10-3 victory over Tom Ford in the final giving him a second German Masters title at the Tempodrom. And Carter admits that he did sense a big chance going to Berlin that week.

"I could feel I had a win in me and I always thought Germany was a big opportunity for me," he said. "I love that venue. I had a good record there, I had won it before and lost in the final. I knew Li Hang was suspended (as part of an investigation into match fixing allegations) and I had a bye through to the 16. So I could break it down into small bite sized chunks. It was a short tournament for me."

That excellent form has continued in the months since too, with Carter runner-up to Shaun Murphy at the Players Championship and then reaching the semi-finals at the WST Classic. Now comes the biggest tournament of them all, at the famous Sheffield venue where Carter has a formidable pedigree.

"My record does give me plenty of confidence," he said. "I saw a piece previewing my Crucible chances and I sort of forget what I have achieved there. I've been there 18 times, been to two finals, a semi-final, three or four quarter-finals, I made a maximum there. I haven't quite won it yet. Hopefully that will still come. If it doesn't I can look back and think yeah, I did a bit at the Crucible. Not as much as some, but more than most.

"I'm just determined this year to go there and try to enjoy it and think look, I've had a great season. If I lose in the first round, obviously I'm going to be gutted, but what I've achieved this season I can't forget about that.

"Just to be able to sit and watch the qualifiers this year and know what it's like to play in them and potentially lose. Not being involved at the Crucible yourself when it's on, it really hurts. When you're sat at home for two and a half weeks and watching it on the telly, when everyone's asking you, ‘who are you playing?'... 'oh what, you're not in it?'... 'wait a minute, you didn’t qualify?’, all that stuff you hear, it's just absolute damage to your brain. So to go there and be a seed is massive for me.

"I'm going to try and win the trophy, of course. But it's one match at a time. I fancy if I can get through the first couple of rounds I can get involved in the tournament. The first round (Carter faces Jak Jones) is always a bit spiky. You've got to have everything lined up to win a tournament. You’ve got to play well, you’ve got to have a bit of help from your opponent, you’ve got to get the right draws. You need the wind blowing in the right direction.

"When all that happens is when the holes line up and you go all the way through to the end. Hopefully this year will be the time that happens for me. I've been to the last hole a couple of times, unfortunately I've met Mr (Ronnie) O'Sullivan there. Without meeting him, I arguably would have been a world champion. Some things in life are not meant to be. But it's down to me to make this a meant to be thing, if you know what I mean."

Resilience on and off the table

Carter has proved himself to be the gutsiest of competitors on the table, but far more important than any of that has been his resilience in life to cope with a number of enormous challenges. Those have included a 20-year battle with Crohn’s Disease, followed by being diagnosed with testicular cancer and then lung cancer a decade ago. Carter is well aware of how much those huge blows and his recoveries from them have touched many snooker fans, and indeed people far beyond.

"I'm writing a book at the moment and I'd like to tell my story to inspire other people, to show how you can still come through the other side and still be successful in your career if you really want it. I've definitely got a good story to tell."

Carter is a compelling character to listen to, and it feels remiss not to ask him about the general state of the game, something that seems to vex most people within snooker right now. He is typically forthright.

"Sometimes the simple things are the ones the governing body do wrong," Carter added. "They did very well in the Covid times to keep the events going. Since then, since Barry (former World Snooker Tour chairman Hearn) stood down really, it feels like things have gone backwards a little bit. The Turkish Masters got cancelled and they only put the WST Classic on at the last minute because the players were screaming.

"At the moment I believe the tour can't support 128 players. I do believe that if you get your tour card and you are a professional snooker player, you should be guaranteed a good living. Whether the tour is 64 players or 80 or whatever. There's 40 or 50 players on the tour now that are not earning anything and they're called professional snooker players. Is that right? For me, no, but I'm not the one running the game.

"We obviously desperately need China back. The powers that be have invested a lot of time, money and effort in China and we were travelling out there lots. Like anything in life, things can always be better. And the players probably do need to stick together and talk the game up rather than slagging it off. What you have to say is that as far as the public is concerned, snooker is as popular as ever."

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