The thought occurred to me as I watched Neil Robertson compile the 18 frames he needed to become world champion at The Crucible on Monday that there is no sport harder to master than snooker.

You can have golf, badminton, surfing, lawn bowls, tennis, squash, ice skating, high diving, table tennis and any football code you'd care to nominate. You can have the lot. Compared to snooker, they are all a doddle.

By that, I mean anyone with a degree of athleticism and hand-eye co-ordination can, with a bit of dedication and practice, become proficient at any of them. Say, the equivalent of a 14- or 15-handicapper at golf. Good without being great.

But not snooker (or billiards, for that matter). The degree of difficulty in mastering the green baize is a whole new, dare I say it, ball game.

Stand at the end of a full-size snooker table and see what I mean. It's enormous. And the six pockets are tiny. And with the chalked end of a cue, you've got to clank the white cue ball into a coloured ball in such a precise way that the second ball finds its way between the jaws of the pocket and into the onion bag at the bottom.

That's one ball negotiated. If you want to compile a decent break, you've got to do this many times over. That means positioning the cue ball in such a way that the second ‘pot' is reasonably straightforward, same with the third shot and so on. Sometimes, the pros can go red-black-red-black and so on till they clear all the reds, then go about clearing the six colours: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and red. This is called a maximum break of 147. It's also called bloody impossible.

Me, if I manage a double-digit break, involving three or four potted balls in a row, I go back to my seat bursting with a kind of quiet elation.

Snooker prodigies are often accused of having misspent childhoods. Little wonder. For it would take an entire childhood, and a fair bit of adolescence and early adulthood to get a handle on this most infuriating of games.

Snooker's difficulty has much to do with the stationary ball. The player has to generate all the speed on the cue ball which sits inert on the felt. One false move, one nervous tic, and the shot is ruined.

A little like golf. The ball is perched there on the tee, or lying 10 metres from the hole on the green, waiting for you to propel it in the right direction. Again, one flaw in the swing, one tense jab with the putter, and you're in trouble.

But in tennis, say, the ball - once it is served into play - is whacked at you at speed. The trick then is getting your racquet head in the right place, at the right time. The ball then does much of the work for you.

So Robbo, BPL lauds you and says take a bow. You've not only become Australia's latest world champion you've done it in a sport which, in the matter of supreme skill, steady hand, steely nerve, unblinking concentration, vivid imagination and Euclidian knowledge of geometry, simply dwarfs all others.