By Elliott West
“It was a surreal moment but I feel like even talking about it is giving them airtime they don’t deserve because they are just idiots. What are they trying to gain from what they have done? I am sure there are better ways to get their point across.”
Mark Allen
A protester pours powder onto the snooker table. Photograph courtesy of Metro.
Introduction
Over the years, a snooker match has been stopped by a water leak or a stray streaker but I have never witnessed the shocking scenes that occurred at this year’s World Championship. I have always thought that snooker events had pretty stringent security measures with bag checks and body searches on members of the public before they can enter an event. For whatever reason, two individuals, a man and a woman managed to gain entry to the Crucible for the evening session matches between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry and between Mark Allen and Fan Zhengyi. The usual deathly silence of matchplay was rudely interrupted when the man and woman appeared from the audience and ran onto the Crucible stage, both wearing white t-shirts with a Just Stop Oil logo on them.
Crucible Drama
As millions watched, the female protester tried to launch herself towards the table involving the match between Allen and Zhengyi with an aim of attaching herself to the table with glue. Her attempt failed, thanks to the swift action of the Belgian referee Olivier Marteel who pounced on her at the right moment, thwarting her efforts by restraint and escorting her off the stage. However, on the other side of the table partition, a more bizarre event played out as the man managed to evade the grasp of security and the referee, hoisting himself onto the table. As all who watched, especially Joe Perry and Robert Milkins watched in shocked amazement, the man stood up on the snooker table and produced a bag with something in it. Out of the bag, came a brown, chalky powder which cascaded onto the table like a ploom of smoke, turning the green baize into a temporary dust bowl, littered with slightly less colourful snooker balls.
Following the eventual removal of this individual, the cleanup began with staff frantically trying to get proceedings underway again. This involved all hands on deck with even Rob Walker, the Master of Ceremonies, rolling up his sleeves and grabbing the Crucible hoover to suck up the large amount of dust on the table. This isn’t the first time that the Just Stop Oil group has infiltrated a sporting event with protesters have already attached themselves to goal posts during a number of Premier League football matches. Thankfully this particular protest didn’t last too long and Yorkshire Police later released a press statement to say that a 30-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman had been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage as a result of the incident.
Afterthoughts
In the UK, we pride ourselves on our democratic society, the right to free speech and to protest and I strongly support these rights but unfortunately, some protest groups including the Just Stop Oil group feel the need to go to extreme lengths to champion their cause. The mindless action by this particular group at the World Championship is frankly pathetic. It is obvious why they chose this particular sporting event to highlight their cause, especially with global television eyes heightened for this snooker tournament, the highlight of the snooker calendar. What these protesters fail to realise is the amount of work it takes to get this event off the ground. The theatre has to be transformed into a snooker stage with riggers and table fitters setting up the lighting, miles of cables and the expensive snooker tables that have to be assembled in multiple pieces.
As a result of their destructive antics, this protest group has ruined an evening for anyone who was lucky enough to have a ticket, potentially damaged the cloth of a snooker table and produced a sporting news headline for the wrong reasons. No sport needs this type of distraction and it breaks my heart to see sporting events used as a soft target to promote a particular cause. Yes, protest but do it another way because these mindless action just blight sport for the wrong reasons.
