Snookered by the black

I watched the fourteenth frame of the World Snooker Championship semi final between Northern Irish player Mark Allen and Chinese youngster Wu Yize yesterday teatime.

The black ball ended up hanging over the bottom right corner pocket with eight reds clustered around it. Normally the players would agree to a rerack and start the frame again, but with a thirty point lead on the scoreboard Allen declined to do so, and the referee was apparently unable to force him to, so for almost an hour the players clipped the reds or played off touching balls, sending the cue ball back to the baulk end of the table without potting anything. Eventually Allen knocked in the black with a deliberate foul shot and Wu went on to win the frame which lasted an hour and forty minutes, a record since the World Championship moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1977. 

It reminded me of the bit in the Patrick Hamilton novel The Plains of Cement where a young boy drives the barmaid in a London pub who's looking after him to distraction by showing her how to play endless cannons in billiards.

There have unsurprisingly been calls for the rules to be changed so that such a frame can never happen again, but the audience who witnessed it live seemed to enjoy the spectacle, as did I watching it on TV, and it's not the only sport where things can technically go on indefinitely: baseball and tennis don't have a clock, and penalty shootouts in football are unlimited too. If it happened all the time it might become a problem, but every few years just adds to the variety of the game.

Mancunian misses and miscues

I watched the World Snooker Final from Sheffield yesterday, the forty-third played at the city's Crucible Theatre since it moved there in 1977.

For the first fifty years of the World Snooker Championship, the final was played across the country, often in less than salubrious venues, such as the British Legion club in Birmingham where the 1972 final was contested in front of spectators sitting on beer crates around the table, reflecting the slightly disreputable, bar room image the sport had before the era of television contracts and tournaments around the world, especially the Far East where the game has grown massively since China first hosted a professional championship in 1997.

I knew that the 1976 final, the last before Sheffield became the permanent home of snooker's most prestigious event, was held at Wythenshawe Forum, the leisure centre where I now go swimming, with Ray Reardon beating Alex Higgins 27-16 in a best of 53 frames match, but there were another four finals in Manchester before that, two, in 1952 and 1954, at Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate, one just down the road at the City Exhibition Hall on Liverpool Road in 1973, and one the following year at Belle Vue.