by Kadeem Simmonds

Reanne Evans hit out yesterday at promoter Barry Hearn’s claim that women get equal opportunities in snooker.

Evans faced Ken Doherty last month in a bid to become the first woman to compete in the Crucible World Championships but narrowly lost 10-8.

The gulf is still wide — 2014 champion Mark Selby pocketed £300,000 while Evans received a measly £1,500 — but Hearn claims the sport is a level playing field: “If the women’s game is serious, they have to grow themselves. They have to be commercially viable. You can’t look for handouts.

“For our tour, there are no barriers to entry, the only condition is ability.”

But the 10-time women’s champion disagrees.

“Barry says it is equal-opportunity but it is not,” she told the BBC.

“We need to attract more, improve the game and build our own women’s tour up, then maybe — in a couple of years — give the top four ranked players places in invitational events or on the tour.

“At the moment ladies don’t want to be pushed into the deep end.

“But we do need to build our own tour up — I think that’s the most encouraging part for women’s snooker.”

On the large differences in prize money, she said: “I have been women’s champion for 10 years, I’m still struggling to earn any money at all.”

Evans will be competing in this years Q School — a system for qualifying for the professional World Snooker Tour — along with Heather Clare from Leicester.

The school runs from May 14-25, with the four semi-finalists in each of the two tournaments earning a two-year card for the World Snooker tour.

Hearn has praised Evans’s talent, saying she is “capable of beating half the field” as well as saying she can “be just as good as a man.”