By Elliott West
Introduction
The start of the new snooker season has exposed a problem that currently exists in the sport. Despite David Gilbert winning the Championship League, the first event of the season and his first professional title, the British Open was unable to produce a champion outside of the top 16 despite all of them being jettisoned by the best of five format bar Mark Williams. The likes of Joe O’Connor, David Gilbert, Elliot Slessor, Jimmy Robertson etc played very well to get to the latter stages of the tournament but when their only candidate left, Gary Wilson reached the final, their hopes were sadly dashed against Mark Williams.
Experience versus Youth
It has to be said that Mark Williams was very lucky to get to the final of the British Open and he has admitted that himself. Throughout the competition, he certainly wasn’t playing his ‘A’ game but for Williams, that didn’t seem to matter. The Welshman was happy to scrap out his wins, having an ethos that he didn’t care if he lost. An attitude probably adopted because he has won everything in snooker including this competition in its old format in 1997. A state of mind that is even more deadly on the table for his opponent and often leads to silverware success.
For Gary Wilson, the trophy was there for the taking when he reached the final of the British Open. Gary had adopted a downbeat view of his run, saying that he could be playing better. At the time, I was thinking was this a ruse to mask his own determination to push himself to his first title or were those his genuine feelings? I would say it was a mixture of the two. When it came to the final itself, Wilson managed to cope fairly well with the Welshman’s tried and tested method of pulverising his opponent for their mistakes. Wilson did manage to go one frame ahead in the match but couldn’t push on further than that and when the game went to 4-4, the game ebbed away from Gary and Williams was able to put his foot on the gas and claim the title.
I don’t want to be hard on Gary because I think he is an exceptional player and greatly admire his work ethos, having to become a taxi driver at one stage, to make ends meet. Gary and other players from these middle rankings will have to be patient and play the waiting game. Success only comes with experience and unfortunately, the likes of Higgins, O’Sullivan and Williams, have it in abundance and that combined with their skills for the sport, is a devastating combination.
People had started to believe that David Gilbert would never win a title after losing in four ranking finals but he proved the critics wrong and won the 2021 Championship League. Like any potential champion, he put this niggling thought to the back of his mind and pressed forward with his goal and achieved it through grit and determination. As a sportsman, you want to shine and expel the negativity from the room, not an easy feat but certainly not impossible and very achievable.
The likes of Higgins, O’Sullivan and Williams won’t be around forever and snooker has to have natural successors to replace them. That accession to the throne may still be a few years away but the key is for these players to make inroads and I do genuinely believe this is starting to happen. They may not be winning titles in abundance yet but the likes of Jordan Brown and David Gilbert have proved that it can be done. Baby steps but eventually there will be light at the end of this long snooker tunnel.
