ALAN McManus’ commute to work for the next week or so will be the five minutes it takes him to navigate his way from Dennistoun to the Emirates Arena for the BetVictor Scottish Open. This is rather unusual considering the gruelling whistle stop tour of unlikely sporting destinations which is the global snooker tour usually requires him to rack up more air miles than Michael Palin. Don’t get him started about pampered footballers who complain about having to get a five-hour flight back from European ties in Kazakhstan.

“I don’t know who it was but they were moaning about a six hour flight,” said McManus. “I feel like saying to them ‘how do you fancy three flights to get where you are going in China, when the others are one hour, ten hours and two hours, all back to back? And you have to pay for it yourself. And you don’t get taken to and from everywhere in a bus. To be back at home and playing is magic, and a couple of weeks before Christmas is great timing too.”

In particular, McManus is ruminating on the theme of his fellow Scot, John Higgins, who mentioned to the world’s media after their meeting at the UK Championships in York this week that, one of the best players ever to play the sport, and beaten world finalist in the last two years he was getting ever so slightly scunnered and had considered retiring at the end of the year.

“Three weeks in China is tough,” said McManus, who came out the victor in that meeting in York this week. “No wonder your head gets pickled from time to time. John was in Asia this fall, out there for four weeks, that would drive you insane. I don’t like being anywhere, so being stuck in North Eastern China, next to the Korean border, for four weeks isn’t my idea of fun.

“If I’m being honest, I think it is just a temporary feeling he has got, that he is a little browned off. I get that all the time. Obviously, John is one of the marquee players in the game so when he says that people run with it. But he never said he is definitely going to retire, he said he has maybe contemplated it. But he is making a good living. Like I always say, snooker is a good life but a tough life.”

This is the third running of the Scottish Open in its current format and at its current base in the East End of Glasgow. Now 47, and having taken one step into the commentary booth, it is a tournament he has never won, the closest being the three finals of the Regal Masters in Motherwell which he lost to Ken Doherty, Peter Ebdon and Nigel Bond in the late 1990s. As usual, an 128-strong draw, McManus faces John Astley of England in the first round. He hopes it is a tournament which is starting to bed in on the calendar.

“This is the one time you get of your own bed and play a match,” said McManus. “The venue is good but I think with any sort of new tournament and venue it takes time to build it. I never used to be that fussed about playing in Scotland, but now that we do so much travelling it is actually a real blessing. I lost a couple of finals in the Regal Masters at Motherwell and I should have won at least one of them.”

McManus will have Higgins, Graeme Dott, Anthony McGIll, Scott Donaldson and Ross Muir for company in the list of Scottish entrants – although Stephen Maguire went further than anyone at the UK Championships, reaching the quarter final then saying that the table on which he lost to Mark Allen deserved to be ‘set on fire’.

“Stevie is doing very well, he has been right on it for a while,” says McManus. “The last year, year and a half he has actually been very consistent which has not been the usual Maguire blueprint. But he has been doing well at most tournaments.

“It would be wrong to say there is a bunch of young guys coming through from Scotland but there are some good young pros there trying to make their way,” he added. “Ross Muir, Scott Donaldson and others will be playing next week and they can take scalps so hopefully they will do. We are never going to produce the Hendrys and the Higgins again because young kids don’t play it.

Snooker isn’t like darts, where you can pick them up and just actually find your magic at it. You have to work your butt off, to be remotely decent, let alone a pro or anything like that. It is quite tough. We have that saying up the road ‘just deal with it’.”