THIS week has been a watershed week for the post-coronavirus world as live sport made its return to the UK.

While the biggest news will certainly be the imminent return of what will be a very different Premier League to our screens from June 17, horse racing and snooker become the first sports to take the post-Covid plunge.

As a rather keen snooker fan, I welcomed the sport’s return on ITV4 on Monday with a special edition of its Championship League.

The tournament is usually among the least heralded on the calendar, but its unconventional group format has allowed the 64 players some valuable match practice before the season properly gets underway, with the World Championship, normally held in April, rescheduled for a July 31 kick-off.

Like all live sport at the moment, the snooker has been played behind closed doors, and while you would expect the normally silent snooker audience to have less of an impact than, say, a riotous sell-out crowd at Anfield, it was still conspicuous in its absence.

While the key to a good snooker audience is generally to be as quiet as possible most of the time, you still get those crucial moments when a crowd erupts.

The knowing applause when a player pots frame ball, the warm appreciation of an excellent long pot or stunning safety escape, the gasps and follow-up cheer of encouragement when a player misses a sitter to let his opponent back in.

There is also the loud clap and occasional cheer/whistle when a player makes a century, or that ever-increasing noise as a player moves towards a maximum 147 break, followed by that huge outpouring of appreciation when that final black goes in.

There was none of that this week. Every pot, every miss, every shot that would usually bring a whooping cheer or audible gasp was met by silence. The only sounds to be heard, besides the voices of the commentators, were the sounds of cue meeting cue ball and the object ball crashing into the pocket.

Admittedly they are some lovely sounds, but it just wasn’t the same.

It might just be that the tournament is regarded as little more than a chance to get some practice in, and that when the big events come around the improved quality and increased importance might make a difference.

But while there are also benefits to the absence of a crowd – you are spared the customary phone going off, despite everyone being told before every session that phones must be on silent or turned off – the atmosphere is just not the same.

Having said that, the current situation probably means that we will be without them, at least at full capacity, for quite some time, and if it’s snooker without an audience or no snooker at all, I’ll pick the former.