Old pros put young guns in their place
WHOEVER SAID life begins at 40 was either lying or was some freak of nature that defied all medical and scientific logic.
I awoke this morning with a pain in my coccyx sharper than a Stanley blade.
A few years ago I would have been searching for the reason why, but now I just put it down to the aches and pains caused by the drifting sands of time.
The sprightly vigour of youth has been well and truly replaced by the stiffness and lethargy of a Junior ‘B’ hurler well past his prime who continues to give his all for the love of the parish.
Age may be just a number, but try telling that to my chiropractor after my six-year-old has just run rings around me on our makeshift pitch on the freshly-cut lawn.
It’s not all bad though, and being the wrong side of 40 is not always all doom and gloom.
Mark Williams, at the ripe old age of 43, proved you can still make it to the top in your twilight years, when beating another veteran of the game, John Higgins, in a nail-biting World Snooker Championship final to win it for a third time.
It bridged a 15-year gap for the Welshman since his last title win, the longest period between championship triumphs in the tournament’s history.
Despite enjoying his best season in years, few would have predicted his success on the biggest stage of all; in fact, it seemed so unlikely to Williams himself that he joked earlier in the competition that he would turn up in his birthday suit to the post-final press conference should he win, and he stuck to his word, with only a towel to protect his modesty.
It has been a remarkable return to the top for Williams, who only twelve months earlier didn’t even qualify for the world championships and was seriously contemplating retirement from the game.
He had to win the tournament the hard way, beating another battle-hardened foe, Barry Hawkins, in a titanic semi-final, before overcoming four-times winner Higgins in a marvellous decider to become the second oldest world champion, after Ray Reardon, who won it in 1978 aged 45.
Snooker used to be a sport that seamlessly moved from one generation to the next; from Ray Reardon to Steve Davis, Davis to Stephen Hendry, Hendry to Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins, but now the game seems to have stood still, with the latest generation unable to wrest control from players that first came into the spotlight in the early ’90s.
Of course, the current situation does raise serious questions about the younger players, when admittedly top-class rivals who have been on the road longer than a clapped-out jalopy are still mopping up the main prizes.
You’d imagine they should have talent to match their illustrious predecessors, so are they lacking heart and the will to win?
Of course, in the back of their minds they may believe they will have plenty of chances to land snooker’s biggest tournament, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
When defending champion Mark Selby was sent packing in the first round and favourite Ronnie O’Sullivan followed him out the exit door in the second, it was an opportunity for one of the young guns to step up to the mark, but instead we had two 40-somethings battling it out in a tense Crucible showpiece.
Obviously the gentlemanly sport of snooker doesn’t require the protagonists to be in peak condition or to have Greek Godlike physique, and it’s not like some guy in his 40s sprinting to Olympic gold, but it’s a fair achievement nonetheless to be capturing a world crown at the ripe old age of 43.
O’Sullivan, Higgins and Williams, even as age begins to catch up with them, are still better than the chasing pack, but they can’t go on forever, so somebody needs to take the game by the scruff of the neck, whether it be Kyren Wilson, Judd Trump, Ding Junghui or another capable cueist.
Or maybe 40 is the new 20 and they’re just waiting until they are in their advancing years to land snooker’s biggest prize.
Now where’s the WD40 I need to struggle out of this chair? That damned coccyx!