“But one thing that’s kept my enthusiasm for this length of time is the science of it. I’ve always been mechanically minded, and in one respect it’s kept my sanity.”As the snooker season moves towards its blue riband event, the World Championship at the Crucible, the former champ knows that at 46 he can still pose a threat. There was a time – the era of Ray Reardon and Eddie Charlton – when 46 was downright young to be a top snooker player Not now. The game has changed dramatically, but Davis, to his credit, has tried to change with it.”One of the ways it has changed is that we now play on very thin cloths. Ronnie doesn’t know any of this, except that he does know it, by instinct.”Davis concedes that he doesn’t love snooker as much as he used to, doesn’t spend the hours on the practice table that he did in his pomp.

Every spin on the cue ball has the opposite effect on the object ball You have to be aware of the physics. When you hit it with overspin, which means it’s spinning faster than it’s rolling, that’s when it powers on through.”But there’s an effect on the object ball, not only on the cue ball. When you put left-hand sidespin on the cue ball, it puts fractional right-hand sidespin on the object ball, which is what you need to know when you’re trying to avoid the double-kiss. But the snooker ball is usually at least rolling, which is spin, and gives it forward momentum. “If I was a coach I’d take your money now and tell you to go away for a week and practise. There’d be no point doing anything else in the session.” But our session continues, with me asking him to explain the different spins he exerts on the cue ball.”You know Newton’s Cradle, the businessmen’s toy? If a ball with no spin hits another ball, it stops It’s like in curling If a stone hits another head on, it stops dead. But if you tried to copy Ronnie you’d probably come unstuck with the speed.”He watches my new improved pull-back, and seems content that I have absorbed the message.

“If you improve your pull-back, that will improve your level of consistency beyond recognition, and that then encourages other good things. Stephen’s is excellent, very simple, and Steven Lee has a great cueing action too They’d be good players to copy, and I’m not bad. A few don’t pause – Jimmy White, Tony Drago – but the suspicion is always that they’d be even better if they did Paul Hunter hasn’t got much of one, but he’s got one. Ronnie has one, but then of course there’s a style within the style.”Davis tells me that Hendry’s is the cueing action I should watch if I want to get better. It’s like the caddie says to the golfer: ‘If you could slow your backswing down to a blur, sir, you’d be a much better player’.

You need to feel that you’re pulling back at half-speed, quarter-speed even, and then pausing before the push-through.”Most of the players – myself, Stephen Hendry – have some sort of pause. You need a controlled pull-back and in the transition from the cue going backwards to forwards, you must stop the cue for a split second. The hit is a separate action from the pull-back, using separate muscles.”The biggest fault that occasional players like you make is that they’re in free fall from the instant they pull the cue back. Which is just as valid.”We knock the balls around for a few minutes, while Davis assesses my style It is not much of one. My highest break is 40, but that was achieved in the distant past, around the time that he won the first of his six World Championships.