I always wondered why it was that snooker players strode so purposefully out of the arena once their tournament sessions were over.

A quick handshake, a wave to the fans and then... whoosh!!!... they're gone, cues tucked firmly under their arms, a determined stride taking them to the privacy that awaits backstage.

Dougie Donnelly and Ray Stubbs are nice fellows, I reasoned, congenial company and all that.

But is the prospect of some gentle snooker chit-chat really enough to explain that fixated stare at the exit as the players make a departure that falls somewhere in speed and force between whirlwind and hurricane?

It just shows how much I know, now that B&H Masters Champion Paul Hunter has revealed that his second successive title owed as much to fiancee Lyndsey Fell as his first last year.

She formed the inspirational basis, you may remember, of "Plan B" in 2001 as Hunter left one afternoon session in the arena for another immediately afterwards with Lyndsey in his hotel room.

He emerged with a grin as wide as a full-size snooker table is long and strutted his way to victory over Fergal O'Brien.

This year, in similar trouble against Mark Williams and in need of yet further coaxing back to form, Hunter invoked "Plan C".

In deference to the modesty of his wife-to-be, Hunter was sparing with the detail but confirmed that it differed from Plan B only in name.

The assumption that she was there simply to pour him a glass of sparkling water from the mini-bar would have been wide of the mark.

Now if I didn't know better, I'd be thinking that Hunter was beginning to make a deliberate habit of his slow starts with the intention maybe of making his way through the alphabet.

Strategy

But he was actually five frames to nil down at one point, and with a �190,000 first prize at stake.

It would surely have been rampant recklessness for him to under-perform at the table with a view to over-performing in the afternoon on the King Size.

So the couple were clearly thinking on their feet. Or not, as the case may be.

But sport has many examples where the Hunter/Fell strategy has been widely contradicted.

Italian football clubs invariably remove their players from wives and girlfriends some time before the weekend with a jolly male-bonding trip to the countryside.