BANGALORE: Pankaj Advani, who won the Asian Games billiards gold, feels that the four medals Indians won in all ‘is a shot in the arm for cue sports and would give it a chance to push for a place in the sports ministry’s priority list’.
Apart from Advani, the snooker team of Yasin Merchant, Aditya Mehta and Brajesh won the silver in the snooker team event, Aditya won the individual snooker silver and Alok Kumar the 8-ball pool bronze.
“That is what we want. All these things were going through my mind (as he was playing the final in Guangzhou). We know how tough it’s to get support for a game like ours or any discipline of sport which requires funding from government and other sources. It’s a bigger picture that we are looking at,” Advani said. “The sweetest part of the victory was I was able to keep this medal for the next four years,” he added. Advani rejected suggestions that his loss in the prequarterfinals of the snooker event was due to poor form. “I have had some really good performances over the year. You can never always land up on the winning side.
When I go into a tournament, no one expects anything less than a gold medal and that can be tricky at times,” Advani said.
The cueist expressed the view that for someone to judge a sportsperson’s “success rate and performance”, one need to check it over a period of three to five years and not six months or one year.
Advani also confessed that for him it’s difficult to imagine a life without billiards and snooker. “Billiards and snooker is my identity.
I really don’t know what I would do without the game. The game has given me everything. If there was no billiards and snooker, there is no Pankaj Advani. No one would know me,” he said.