By Elliott West
Introduction
Held at Goffs between 26th to 31 Match, 1985, this tournament featured twelve professional players. A non-ranking event with a winner’s prize of £20,000, this event was won by Jimmy White for the first time when he defeated Alex Higgins 9-5 in the final.
The Tournament
First Round
Eddie Charlton beat Dennis Taylor 5-4
With Taylor perhaps suffering a letdown after his contribution to Ireland’s Guinness World Cup Final defeat of England three days previously, Charlton had little difficulty taking the first three frames.
Taylor came to life in the fourth with breaks of 35 and 51 but conceded 28 in penalties in the 55 minutes fifth frame as Charlton preserved his three frame advantage at 4-1.
Charlton, hitherto without a win over any player ranked in the top 16 this season, then faded as Taylor improved and three straight frames to the Irishman brought the score to 4-4 before Charlton’s break of 69 in the decider concluded the match.
Jimmy White beat Tony Meo 5-1
White went four up in only 56 minutes and the best Meo could do was to salvage the first frame after the mid-session interval.
Eugene Hughes beat Ray Reardon 5-0
Reardon discarded the spectacles he had worn for the circuit’s two previous tournaments but donned a green eyeshade midway through the third frame in order to combat the glare from the television lighting.
He could well have won both the second and fourth frames but lost them both in black ball finishes as Hughes recorded his second win in three encounters with the six times former world champion that season.
Quarter-Finals
Tony Knowles beat Eddie Charlton 5-3
Knowles was very comfortably placed at 3-0 and 4-1 but allowed his concentration to drift as Charlton, with breaks of 55 and 89 won the next two frames to get back in contention at 3-4.
Jimmy White beat Cliff Thorburn 5-3
In their Benson and Hedges semi-final at Wembley two months earlier, Thorburn’s precise methodical game had turned a 0-3 deficit into a 6-4 win.
This time, however, White’s potting and break building were never blunted as a high quality match reached 3-3.
White’s highest breaks of 101, 56 and 57 were all frame winners and Thorburn’s three frame successes up this point were gained in clear cut fashion with decisive break making. However the Canadian could score only six points in the last two frames as two more fine efforts of 63 and 51 took White into the semi-finals.
Steve Davis beat Eugene Hughes 5-4
When Davis was called for a push shot in the opening frame Hughes took an ambitious long red and compiled a winning break of 65.
Twice missing the green after taking the last two reds in the second, Davis also missed the pink as Hughes went two up. Two Davis misses on the last red prefaced a yellow to pink clearance which extended the Dubliner’s lead to 3-0. Though it was Davis’s mistakes which had been crucial, it was Hughes’s steadiness which accounted for this score line.
Davis at last began to show with a break of 52 in the fourth and when Hughes missed the blue in the fifth which would have put him 4-1 up, the match turned.
Davis afterwards admitted “I decided to grovel and crawl my way back into the match. I gained a lot of confidence when he missed that blue in the fifth”.
Working hard but lacking confidence or fluency, Davis took two more frames to lead 4-3 before Hughes delighted the capacity and partisan crowd by making a break of 66 to level at 4-4. “It was like the coliseum in Rome,” said Hughes afterwards. “They wanted his head and I wanted to give it to them”. But Davis was not for decapitation yet. A break of 49 gave him the initiative in the decider and he never surrendered it.
Alex Higgins beat Kirk Stevens 5-3
There was nothing especially memorable about the way Higgins reached 4-1 except that Stevens had chances at both pink and black to win the first frame and missed the brown which would have given him the fourth.
The Canadian did come to life by winning the next two frames to narrow the gap to 3-4 but Higgins ran away with the eighth to clinch his place in the semi-finals.
Semi-Finals
Jimmy White beat Tony Knowles 6-4
The classic ‘match of two halves’ saw Knowles lead 4-1 before White took the match with a run of five straight frames.
White afterwards revealed at the interval, his manager, Noel Miller Cheevers had advised him to take his time.
“I inched my way back into the game. I’d been playing good snooker but it’s composing yourself. When I’m potting it’s ok but on the safety shots you have take your time. When it went 4-2, I thought I would win”.
So he did but each but the last four frames was decided on the colours. The crucial difference between the players in these closing stages seemed to be that White’s confidence was growing as Knowles’s was diminishing.
Alex Higgins beat Steve Davis 6-2
Higgins recorded his fourth win over Davis in their seventeenth meeting in a major event thus becoming the only professional to have recorded four wins over the world champion.
Rarely, however, has Davis cued so badly. A fellow professional analysed this problem thus: “He’s bringing his cue back so far it’s almost coming off his bridge and the pause at the back of his backswing is so long it isn’t a pause, it’s a halt”.
Davis did have a shot at the black to lead 2-0 and actually did lead 2-1 but only a limited amount can be achieved by conscious effort and the longer the match proceeded the more his game fell apart.
Higgins did not play that well – he did need to – but from the fourth frame onwards he was well in command.
The Final
Jimmy White beat Alex Higgins 9-5
Only 83 minutes play was needed for White to take a 4-3 interval lead, his 120 break in the fifth frame providing the highlight.
This gave him a 4-1 lead but Higgins took the two remaining frames of the afternoon – the last after White had missed the pink for 5-2 – and also won the first of the evening at 4-4.
Three frames in a row took White to 7-4 and he went three up with four to play at 8-5 when Higgins crucially missed the black from its spot after taking the penultimate red.
A break of 70 helped White clinch victory, his first over Higgins in competition, in the following frame.It was not one of White’s vintage performances by any means but there was some aspects of it from which he derived satisfaction.
“I nicked a lot of games I normally lose. Usually I win frames with big breaks but this time I was winning them on the colours,” he commented.
Summary
Goffs has always produced fantastic snooker. An arena that is usually used for Irish horse trading, has fitted snooker like a glove, a venue where blood and sweat has littered the green baize and produced some breathtaking finals. The 1985 final was no exception and crowned Jimmy White as an Irish champion, fittingly beating his good friend Alex Higgins.
