Snooker: a new “grandmaster of the baize” at the Crucible
The final of this year’s Snooker World Championship was the first since 2005 “to have a guaranteed firsttime winner”, said Elgan Alderman in The Times. It pitted English 12th seed Kyren Wilson – a defeated finalist in 2020 – against Welsh qualifier Jak Jones. Jones had “needed almost 46 hours of play to reach his first major final” – nearly double the amount required by his opponent – and “he was on fumes” as the match began: as a result, he lost the opening seven frames. Though he displayed great “gumption” thereafter, Jones could never recover from his terrible start, and Wilson maintained a significant lead throughout, said Charles Richardson in The Daily Telegraph. When, on Monday night, the Englishman went 17-11 up, the match seemed as good as over, yet Jones continued to battle, and reeled off the next three frames – even coming close to a maximum 147 break in one. Under immense pressure, Wilson “held his nerve to clinch the magic 18”.
Wilson’s path to the top has not been straightforward, said Aaron Bower in The Guardian. The 32-year-old, who had dreamed of a snooker career since early childhood, initially found life on the tour brutally tough – so much so that after a solitary season he returned to his home town of Kettering and combined practice with a job behind a bar. Over the next few years, as he struggled to re-establish himself on the tour, he experienced many “bumps in the road”, and often considered quitting the sport. Even this year, his form has been indifferent, and “he was far from one of the favourites”. Yet his path was cleared by a string of upsets – Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump both lost in the quarter-finals – and he seized this opportunity to become “a new grandmaster of the baize”. After winning on Monday, he burst into tears, turned to the Crucible crowd and said: “I will never forget this moment, so thank you.”