Ronnie O’Sullivan has cast doubt on his involvement in this year’s World Championship, admitting he has not yet decided whether to enter the tournament. O’Sullivan has played in every World Championship since making his debut in 1993, but the snooker icon has struggling with his game.

The seven-time world champion has not played at a ranking event since his first-round defeat to Barry Hawkins in November’s UK Championship, before breaking his cue after a defeat to Robert Milkins at the Championship League in January.

O’Sullivan has not played since that match, pulling out of the Masters and four other tournaments on medical grounds after struggling for form.

The 49-year-old has started practising again in an attempt to rediscover his form and plans to make a decision on his involvement in the World Championship on Wednesday, just three days before the tournament is due to start.

“If it’s like it is today, it’s just not going to be pretty for me,” O’Sullivan admitted in an interview with the Daily Mail. “I’m not quitting just yet, but I will give myself two years to try and figure it out.

“I don’t want to finish my career feeling like I wasn’t really performing to the level that I know I can. I don’t have to win tournaments, but I just want to feel like I’m enjoying the game. I’d like to go out with a smile on my face.

“I have to try and repair myself and just try and find how I used to play snooker. It’s a massive rebuilding process and probably the last one I’ll ever have to do as a snooker player. Do I think I can do it? Probably not if I’m being honest.

“I think it’s probably a bit too late in my career and I’m probably damaged goods in the form of a snooker player. You take a lot of battle scars over the years. But I’m not prepared to quit at this point because I feel like I would be quitting on a bit of a low.”

Reflecting on the incident where he broke his cue, O’Sullivan admitted he regrets his actions. “I regret it, but that wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, I’d had four years of just really struggling and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he explained.

“It wasn’t the losing, it was the playing really, really badly. Four years of bad spells is a long time, so it burnt me out. It ground me down. It’s been torturous. I got to the point, especially at the start of the season, when I was getting scared to go near the practice table or getting scared to get my cue out of my case.

“I tried playing left-handed for a whole month in August. Then I tried to change my bridge and I was wearing plasters on my fingers. So I have tried a lot of things but I’ve hit a dead end, which is why I needed to take time out.

“It’s not a mental thing. It’s more of a physical thing. It’s really hard to explain. Watching my game on TV, I could see what was wrong, but I just didn’t know how to fix it. In the end, I couldn’t even watch myself play because I just hated it.

“I believe that goes back six years to when I started changing my technique to try to find that extra five per cent of consistency. But I’ve totally made my game worse.”

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