Mark Allen has never been afraid to speak his mind, but even by his standards, his latest comments about playing in Saudi Arabia have sent a jolt through the snooker world. What began as a routine post-match interview turned into something far more intriguing — a reflection not just on sporting conditions, but on a feeling so surreal that Allen compared it to “stepping off Earth entirely.”
Allen, fresh from a tense victory at the Riyadh Masters, admitted that he expected unfamiliarity, expected glitz, expected noise — but what he didn’t expect was a silence so heavy it sounded engineered*. The arena, built with futuristic precision, had an atmosphere unlike anything he had experienced in his two decades as a professional. “You walk in,” Allen explained, “and the crowd is there… but it’s like they’re behind a veil. Like the sound takes a second to reach you. It doesn’t feel like normal physics.”
He described moments in which the crack of the cue seemed to hang in the air too long, suspended like a soundbite played in slow motion. The lighting, cold and geometric, made the table glow with an almost artificial brightness, as if it had been rendered rather than set. “The whole place feels… staged, but in a good way,” he said, laughing. “I told my coach it was like playing snooker inside a sci-fi film.”
But what truly startled fans was the twist in Allen’s story — he didn’t dislike it. In fact, he embraced the strange, otherworldly sensation. While some players privately grumbled that Saudi events lacked the warmth of British or European crowds, Allen saw something different: a psychological challenge, a test of adaptability, a landscape so unfamiliar that every shot demanded a recalibrated sense of reality.
“It forces you to listen differently,” he said. “To focus differently. When you’re in Belfast or Sheffield, you know every nuance — every cough, every shuffle, every ripple of applause. Here, it’s… alien. But that makes you sharper.”
The crowd itself, though quieter and less spontaneous than traditional snooker audiences, intrigued him. “They watch with this intense stillness,” Allen noted. “You don’t realize they’re fully invested until a frame ends and the applause hits you like a delayed wave.”
He also pointed out that many spectators in Saudi Arabia are new to the sport, absorbing its rhythms for the first time. Their reactions aren’t conditioned by history or habit — they respond with pure, unfiltered curiosity. “It’s refreshing. You feel like you’re introducing snooker to an entirely new world,” Allen said. “And honestly? That energy, even when quiet, is powerful.”
The more he spoke, the clearer it became that Allen wasn’t criticising the Saudi atmosphere — he was marvelling at it. What some would call strange, he called fascinating. What others called sterile, he called futuristic.
In a season already full of geographical expansion and cultural experimentation, Allen’s comments add an unexpected layer: maybe global snooker isn’t just travelling to new countries — maybe it’s stepping into new dimensions.
“If this is the future,” Allen concluded, “then the game is heading somewhere bold. Somewhere different. Maybe even somewhere other-planetary.”
