Whoever lifts the World Snooker Championship trophy aloft on Monday evening as the confetti streams down around them will have reached the pinnacle of their sport. If it’s John Higgins, it would be for the fifth time, for Shaun Murphy the second and for Mark Allen or Wu Yize, the very first occasion.
It will be a remarkable achievement, the highlight of a career and the fulfilment of a dream that began in childhood. But whoever emerges triumphant will inevitably, sadly, only achieve a fraction of the headlines that frame 14 of the second semi-final did.
After all, pure sporting accomplishment can never match abject farce when it comes to capturing public interest.
And make no mistake, what occurred at the Crucible Theatre on Friday afternoon was the most abject of farces. Allen and Wu played out the longest frame in Crucible history – an epic that lasted more than 100 minutes and ended with Wu snatching his only frame of the afternoon to escape the session locked at 7-7 in their best-of-33 encounter. Yet that barely begins to tell the story.
For 55 minutes, neither player potted a ball as – with Allen leading by 39 points to 13 – the black blocked the right corner pocket and all remaining eight reds gathered around it, creating a logjam that showed no signs of ending as both men sent the cue ball up and down the table, flicking off the cluster.
A state of delirium came over the Crucible as spectators vociferously cheered every shot, chants of ‘wooooooaaaaah’ and ‘Wuuuuuu’ echoed round the arena and harried referee Marcel Eckardt resorted to increasingly hopeless pleas for quiet and decorum to return.
Eckardt had the ability to end the stalemate at any time but instead let it continue until Rob Spencer – who will referee the final and is part of World Snooker Tour’s (WST) tournament director team – entered the arena and had a word with Eckardt, ostensibly informing him that should a re-rack (when a frame is restarted due to stalemate) be called, the frame wouldn’t actually restart there and then, due to the need to play the other semi-final between Higgins and Murphy in the evening session.
“Come on ref, you’ve got to do something here,” fumed 1991 world champion John Parrott on commentary for the BBC. “You’ve got to step in. This is just silly.”
Belatedly, Eckardt did act, warning the players that if the situation hadn’t been progressed by the time they completed three more shots each, he would order a re-rack, rendering the previous hour or so void. That decision was much to the chagrin of Allen, nursing his 26-point lead, and he was eventually forced to commit a foul by potting the black that – after half an hour of more drama – led to Wu winning the longest frame in Crucible history.
“In a nutshell that frame is an embarrassment to snooker, and the referees’ and the players’ association need to try to work out a way so that never happens again,” said six-time world champion Steve Davis, working as a pundit for the BBC.
Ways to stop such a unique situation from occurring appear tough to legislate for, with ideas such as a hard limit on the number of shots allowed without an attempt at a pot being fraught with difficulty. Truthfully, Eckardt had the power to end the farce at any time and should have intervened sooner to stop a scene that, while quite entertaining for its novelty value, was not a great look for the sport as a whole.
WST quickly ruled out making any sort of rule change around re-racks and defended its man, saying it felt that “the rule was applied correctly” by the referee.
Seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry disagreed, saying at one point during the impasse: “The referee needs to call this, I’m afraid. In my opinion he should have called it a while ago… This is the dark side of snooker.”
While the description of some reds stuck around the corner pocket as “the dark side of snooker” is rank hyperbole, given the sport is still recovering from a match-fixing scandal, which saw 10 Chinese players banned from the game, it was certainly a ludicrous situation that was badly handled.
And it capped an arduous session of a semi-final that had begun with great promise on Thursday evening, when 22-year-old Wu – the only semi-finalist under the age of 40 but with the snooker world at the tip of his cue – produced a scintillating spell to build a 6-2 lead in the race to 17.
Friday afternoon’s encore was largely a slog as, in addition to the 100-minute epic, another frame took an hour before Allen got the snooker he needed and pinched it on the black. The Northern Irishman did make a majestic break of 145 in frame 11 and another century in frame 13 as he won each of the first five to turn a 6-2 deficit into a 7-6 lead but the fact there was only time for six of the scheduled eight frames to be played tells its own story.
Luckily, the two sides of the snooker coin were out in full force, with Murphy and Higgins engaged in a humdinger in the other last-four clash. As if to prove a point, they completed their first four frames of the evening, the mid-session interval and the early stages of a fifth frame in the amount of time it took Wu and Allen to play out their record-breaking marathon.
The snooker heavyweights had traded blows in the morning, entering the day at 4-4 before Higgins – chasing a fifth world title and trying to become the oldest world champion in history – notched breaks of 72, 67, 57 and 86 to open up a two-frame advantage, only for 2005 champion Murphy to hit back and level at 8-8.
The evening delivered more captivating snooker as Murphy produced runs of 60, 82 and 105 but was never able to keep his nose in front and his 50-year-old foe made three half-century breaks before a mesmerising 101 in the final frame to inch into a 13-11 lead. Saturday afternoon’s conclusion, with Higgins needing four frames for victory and Murphy requiring six, could make for an all-time classic.
While Wu and Allen’s semi-final may not have been quite as entertaining so far, the fact there is nothing between them means that their final two sessions might also deliver something special.
Who knows, perhaps tomorrow’s headlines will even be about greatness on the table rather than fiasco.
