The Rocket rallies at The Crucible but still trails
The Betfred World Championship got under way yesterday as the tournament enforced a new ban on football shirts.
World Snooker announced ahead of the event that fans in “sportswear or team sport shirts” would be denied entry to the Crucible arena.
Coventry supporter Brian Wright has been a front-row regular at snooker’s blue riband tournament for almost 30 years, and has become well known for his array of retro Sky Blues shirts which are often seen behind the players on television.
He arrived in a Coventry shirt yesterday but was told by tournament director Mike Ganley he would need to change to be allowed in.
Anticipating that would be the case, Mr Wright brought a button-up skyblue-and-white striped shirt with him, and the 48-year-old was allowed in to watch the snooker after changing.
On the eve of the tournament, fivetime champion Ronnie O’Sullivan had described the ban as “quite laughable”.
O’Sullivan set off slowly in his mission to land a sixth world title, with Scotland’s Stephen Maguire surging 4-0 ahead of the pre-tournament favourite at the afternoon mid-session interval.
Their clash looked on paper to be the pick of the first-round matches and it was surprisingly one-sided in the early stages in favour of the Scot.
O’Sullivan missed a host of opportunities to stamp his mark on the contest, and Maguire took full advantage, firing in breaks of 101 and 95 to give himself a dream start.
O’Sullivan found a spark to string together three frames in quick succession, making back-to-back 118 and 110 breaks to take his Crucible career total to 164 centuries.
But he was not enjoying the more strategic frames and appeared to lose his composure at times in the eighth, losing that and the last of the session to fall 6-3 behind.
The contest plays to a finish this morning, with Maguire firmly in the ascendancy.