Ronnie O'Sullivan explains furious outburst brought on by 'torturous' situation

 Ronnie O'Sullivan has regret over an incident earlier this year.

Ronnie O’Sullivan says he regrets angrily snapping his cue and dumping it in a bin earlier this year. Anger got the better of the snooker icon as he fell to a 3-2 defeat against Robert Milkins in the Championship League.

O’Sullivan smashed his cue after missing a simple pot against Milkins in March, which was his fourth defeat in five matches. He discarded it inside a bin in the players’ lounge before quickly withdrawing from the upcoming Masters on medical grounds. Despite showing remorse over the incident, O’Sullivan insists a fiery incident had been brewing for some time as he was furious with his ‘tortuous’ form.

“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,” O’Sullivan told the Daily Mail.

“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.”

O’Sullivan was going through a tough period in which he could barely watch his own performances on television without growing frustrated. The 49-year-old confessed that attempting to change his game in a bid to find consistency had a detrimental impact on his game.

Ronnie O'Sullivan snapped his cue and has not found one he's comfortable with since

He continued: “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.

“My biggest mistake was when I was like 13, 14, trying to copy players like James Wattana and Ken Doherty. They were the best players I’d ever seen live and I thought I needed to cue like them.

“That’s where the problems started. I should never have gone away from what I had because what I had was better than anybody else has ever had, in my opinion. I was self-taught. It was just very solid, very natural. I played for fun then.”