10 Sportspeople Considered The Greatest Ever

Being great and being popular are not always analogous. Yet despite his eccentric theatrics and often blasé attitude to the sport gradually losing him favour with ardent snooker fans, there's little question that Ronnie O'Sullivan was and remains an almost unmatched artist with a cue.

O'Sullivan's swift dismissal of balls on the baize earned him the sobriquet 'The Rocket', and there was no greater demonstration of this title than his belief-beggaring maximum break in under five and a half minutes at the 1997 World Snooker Championships.

It was not only his first professional 147, but also the quickest in the history of competitive snooker. The Essex Exocet would go on to score another twelve maximum breaks, as well as 824 century breaks - both records in the sport.

In 2001, O'Sullivan finally won his first World Championship, but by then he had already garnered a reputation as snooker's bad boy large enough to match his playing abilities.

Marking yourself out as a maverick in a sport as sedate as snooker isn't exactly difficult, but O'Sullivan's antics were often so dramatically and incongruously over the top that they wouldn't have looked out of place in the theatre (think Arthur Miller's The Crucible rather than Sheffield's Crucible, perhaps).

In 1998, O'Sullivan had been stripped of his Irish Masters title after failing a drugs test (the most remarkable part of the story being that drugs tests exist in snooker), and over the coming years endured a peculiar on-and-off relationship with the sport during which the capricious potter was likely to down cue at a moment's notice.

By 2013, O'Sullivan had stopped even practicing - but this still wasn't enough to stop him walking into the World Championships and claiming a fifth title without breaking a sweat. They say talent plus hard work pays off, but for 'The Rocket', only the former was necessary.

An Alternative Choice: Stephen Hendry

As far as concrete achievements go, Edinburgh-born Hendry eclipses O'Sullivan in every department. He has won the most world ranking titles, was snooker's world number one for eight straight years, and was the sport's youngest ever world champion. But he is the victim of his own efficient brilliance. Unlike Ronnie, Hendry's huge list of accomplishments were racked up in the most perfunctory of manners: always impressive, but never exciting.

Oh, and by the way, yes: snooker is a sport. Pacing around such a large table all day can be very tiring.