Interview: Snooker player Ding Junhui

The Chung Ku, a large Cantonese restaurant in reclaimed dockland in the Dingle district of Liverpool, hasn't known this kind of excitement since Cherie Blair dropped by. In fact, not even Mrs Blair caused a rumpus like this. Every few minutes, as discreetly as possible, different members of the Chung Ku's kitchen brigade push open the swing doors leading into the restaurant, to take a peek at the young man tucking enthusiastically into stir-fried beancurd with mangetout. After lunch, every waiter has a photograph taken with him, followed by the manager, who, plainly mindful of the dignity of office, smiles just a little less broadly than everyone else.

The object of all this attention is wearing a Nike T-shirt bearing a picture of Michael Jordan, a reminder that he is himself little more than a star-struck kid - indeed, he was still a teenager until earlier this month. But Ding Junhui is already the third most popular sportsman in China, behind the Houston Rockets basketball player Yao Ming and the 110-metre hurdler Liu Xiang. And if he wins this year's 888.com World Snooker Championship, which begins tomorrow, then 1.3 billion people will proclaim him a national hero.

To do so, however, Ding will have to beat the favourite Ronnie O'Sullivan in Sunday's first-round match, a draw that O'Sullivan, no more delighted about it than Ding, this week called "a fix". He later retracted that accusation, but there is no doubt that O'Sullivan v Ding is an unusually mouthwatering prospect for so early in the Championship, made possible only because Ding, at the time of the draw, was ranked 27th in the world. He now stands ninth.

Over a sumptuous lunch at Chung Ku, I ask Ding, through his ever-present interpreter, what it is like to play O'Sullivan. "He is technically the best player in the world," comes the reply. "You can never give him a chance. And it is not only tough to play against Ronnie, you have to play against the crowd too."

There is bitter experience in Ding's words. In the final of the Saga Insurance Masters at Wembley in January he had the misfortune to encounter the Rocket in particularly turbo-charged form, with a raucous audience both urging on their hero and cheering his young opponent's misses. At 9-3 down in a first-to-10 match, a tearful Ding was about to throw in the towel, but was dissuaded from doing so by O'Sullivan himself, who sweetly told him that there are bigger things to worry about in life than a snooker tournament, that he should think of his family. "I grew up after that," Ding says. "It won't happen again."

There are some, however, who think that as soon as he shakes hands with O'Sullivan on Sunday, the Crucible will prove too hot for him. They forget that the Rocket was merely levelling the score in January, having lost 9-6 to Ding in the final of the Northern Ireland Trophy last August. And in winning the UK Championship at York in 2005, Ding yielded just 17 frames, winning 45. He manifestly has both the stamina and the talent to win the biggest tournament of all.

The first signs of that talent came on a pavement outside his house - in Yixing near Shanghai - when he was eight years old. "In China at that time there were not many snooker clubs. My father played with his friends on a table in the street, and one day I played one of his friends at eight-ball pool, and beat him."

His father, a humble shoe salesman, soon realised that he had a prodigy on his hands. He took Ding to Dongguan, where China's national snooker team trained, and where the two of them lived in a room of five square metres partitioned from the club. When they ran out of money, Ding's father phoned his wife and told her to sell the family home in Yixing, mortgaging their lives against his boy's ability.

The gamble paid off, and some. Ding Snr doesn't sell shoes any more. Bankrolled by his son's sponsors, he owns a 26-table snooker club in Shanghai, although that is the least of the impact Ding has had on snooker in China. More than 100 million people watched him win the 2005 China Open, and since then, interest in the sport has erupted. At any time of day, there are said to be around two million people playing snooker in China. More than 10 million people play more than once a week. And Ding, almost coyly, concedes the extraordinary effect he has had.

"When I was a small boy, snooker was not in the top 10 favourite sports in China," he tells me. "Table tennis was top, followed by soccer, basketball and badminton. Now, basketball is top, because of Yao Ming. But snooker is definitely in the top five."

Following this burst of immodesty, Ding turns his attention to some steamed scallops. His interpreter, Matt Zhang, adds an observation of his own. "Ding is very famous in China," he says. "He goes down no street unrecognised, even faraway cities in Inner Mongolia."

To achieve such fame, he had to travel even further than Inner Mongolia - to outer Wellingborough. An astute Blackpudlian called Keith Warren, who already managed several Chinese players as well as Britain's Peter Ebdon, had known about Ding since the boy was 11 and regularly beating decent adult players. When he was 15, Warren invited him to England for six weeks to practise with Ebdon, who was then world champion. He saw enough to invite him back more permanently, getting him digs in the Wellingborough home of Ebdon's mother-in-law.

The recollection brings a shy smile to Ding's face. "It was my first time away from home. In China I had family and friends around me but here I had to make my own bed, depend on myself. I couldn't speak English, and I still find that very hard. Also, the weather was different, my surroundings were different. It was very strange to me, coming from China, to see so few people on the streets in Wellingborough, seldom anyone at all at night. There were no tall buildings. The food was different. I had never used a knife and fork before, but I learned quickly. It all improved me a lot as a person, made me more independent, although at first it was very tough for me. I had never cooked for myself before, had never learnt anything from my mother, and when I tried to cook Chinese food it was inedible."

Ding has moved to Sheffield now, where last Sunday he discovered a Chinese restaurant he considers the best in the city. Yes, he says, he had to pose for lots of photographs there, too. And yes, he had to pay. In some Chinese restaurants, his bill is waived. He still misses his mother's cooking, he adds, especially her version of huo guo, best translated as hot pot. But she came over with him for several months at the beginning of this season, and the ready supply of huo guo was clearly beneficial: he promptly beat O'Sullivan in Belfast. Moreover, although his mum has gone home, she taught the woman who looks after him, Patricia Murphy, who comes from rather closer to Shannon than Shanghai, to make a very palatable huo guo. Next year, when he gains his five-year residential status, Ding will buy a house in Sheffield. It already feels more like home than Wellingborough did. "But it is not like Shanghai," he says, and there's no arguing with that.

I ask him to name the prettiest place he has seen in England? "York," he says, perhaps thinking less of York Minster than the inside of the city's Barbican Centre, where, in an evocative encounter between the old guard and the new, he beat Steve Davis in the final of that memorable UK Championship two years ago. And has he tried English food? "Steak," he says, without recourse to the interpreter. "And fish and chips. Very good."

More pertinently, I ask him what his ambition is in snooker: to win the World Championship once, twice, five times? "To be the world No 1 for as long as possible," he says.

There are plenty in the game, O'Sullivan included, who consider that to be more a case of when than if. But to project a little further into the future, has he considered the prospect of one day surrendering his status as world No 1 to a younger compatriot? Thanks to the Ding factor, there are already 14-year-old Chinese kids wielding cues as expertly as chopsticks and knocking in century breaks for fun.

"In the near future I hope that lots of Chinese players will come through," he says. "There are already four of us on the main tour, and lots of very good players back in China. But what they lack is the opportunity to come here and practise with the world's greatest players, like I did with Peter Ebdon. They should come to the UK sooner and practice for a year or two to gain confidence. I was just an average player when I came. I thought I was better than I was. But I improved quickly. Like me, [his compatriots] Lang Wenbo and Tian Pengfei are much better for the experience."

Yet Ding knows better than to talk bullishly about his chances of winning this year's World Championship. "Four years ago there were people saying that I would win it," he says, "but it has taken me four years just to qualify. So I need to be realistic."

To turn his chance of winning into hard realism, he has been practising this past fortnight with Ebdon, playing the best of 19 frames every day under match conditions at Sheffield's World Snooker Academy. He does not quite have Ebdon's zeal for fitness, but Ding doesn't drink or smoke and plays as much basketball as he can. He is a basketball nut, and a devoted fan, unsurprisingly, of the Houston Rockets.

Indeed, he prefers to watch basketball on television than snooker, and has barely even watched the World Championship on the box. Nor, despite living in Sheffield, has he ever been to the Crucible. Warren thinks the venue's intimacy will come as a pleasant surprise, suiting him better than Wembley did, especially with O'Sullivan as his opponent. On Sunday we will see.

But for now, with lunch over at Chung Ku, Ding has an even more famous sporting arena to visit. The reason he is on Merseyside is that Warren, a fanatical supporter of Liverpool FC, has arranged for him to be given a tour of Anfield. He is met there by former player Brian Hall, and handed over to an elderly guide, who shows him the parts of the stadium that are usually off limits, including the fabled Boot Room, and gives him a shirt with Ding 8 on the back. Eight, as well as being worn by Steven Gerrard, is considered a lucky number in China. That's why 888.com was so called, when someone realised that it wouldn't hurt to have an online casino with a name that appeals to a billion Chinese. By 7 May, Ding Junhui might be a name that appeals to them a whole lot more.

* 1 April 1987 Born in Yixing, Jiangsu, China.

* 2002 Won Asian Under-21 Championship, Asian Championship, and IBSF World Under-21 Championship.

* 2003 Turned professional and became Chinese No 1.

* February 2004 Wild card for Masters in London, where he beat the then world No 16, Joe Perry, in first round before losing to Stephen Lee in next round.

* March 2005 Celebrated 18th birthday by reaching the final of the China Open in Beijing, along the way beating Peter Ebdon, Marco Fu and Ken Doherty. In that final he played the then world No 3, Stephen Hendry, whom he beat 9-5, to score his first ranking tournament win.

* December 2005 beatSteve Davis 10-6 in the final of the UK Championship at the Barbican Centre in York - becoming the first player from outside Britain or Ireland to win the event.

* August 2006 beat Ronnie O'Sullivan 9-6 in the final of the Northern Ireland Trophy.

* December 2006 Won individual gold, doubles gold and team gold at Asian Games in Doha.