Ronnie O'Sullivan won the Welsh Open title last night for the 3rd time beating 4 time ranking winner of the season so far Ding Junhui 9-3 in the final.
Ding was nowhere near his best in the opening session having several chances to win several of the frames, but he couldn't seem to take any of them, going from a position where he could have been at 4-4 had he taken his chances, to 1-7 down after the first session of 8 frames, and Ronnie (who'd made a couple of 90 breaks) only 2 frames from taking the title. The final session started off with Ding Junhui showing us how close the final could've been had he taken his first session chances making 2 centuries to close the gap to 3-7. He had another chance in the next to steal the frame from Ronnie, but he couldn't take it and O'Sullivan put himself a frame from victory at 3-8. Ronnie O'Sullivan then went on and won the match in only a way that Ronnie O'Sullivan could win a match and a tournament, with a maximum 147 break. It showed how sublimely Ronnie had been playing and brought the roof off of the Newport Centre, especially when he had to play the last red left handed, from the right side cushion in the top half of the table, and play a deep screw shot to get back on the black. Despite playing the black left-handed he played the shot to perfection, and better than 99% of tour players would have played it with their "stronger hands".
It showed the genius of the man that is Ronnie O'Sullivan, who many people now believe is currently the best British sportsman, which begs the question as to how this man (who is the best player by a country mile in his chosen sport) was not nominated for sports personality last year, and if he doesn't get nominated this year I think there will be an even bigger up roar than there was last year. However, Ronnie's performances in Wales this week also show how he has mastered the snooker system to his advantage, something that no other player on tour has been able to do. Ronnie does a fantastic job of picking and choosing his events to ensure that he is not only fresh when it matters, but so that he is happy in himself and able to find a balance between his snooker, his family and social lives. In fact you could see yesterday in the Welsh Open final that he was probably the happiest he has been playing snooker, and enjoying playing the game, more than he has done for many, many years. What Ronnie does is play some of the smaller PTC events in Europe, whilst making sure that he is fresh and ready for the big UK events like the UK Championship, Masters, Welsh Open and the World Championship. Meanwhile, while Ronnie has his feet up at home or is out for a nice relaxing run, the rest of the snooker players are slogging their guts out travelling here, there and everywhere to win a race that has this season become about coming 2nd place to either Ronnie, Ding or Neil Robertson. Are the very top players benefiting from playing every week? In most cases the answer is no! Only on a few occasions do you see players play themselves into good form, and that mostly still comes from their hard work and dedication off of the table. With players playing so much though, do they put in enough practice? In some cases the answer could again be no. Having won 3 ranking events prior to Christmas, Ding Junhui was so tired by the UK Championships, that after that he went home to China and had 2 weeks complete rest and came back for the Masters terribly unprepared and lost in the opening round. The same thing happened to Neil Robertson before last seasons World Championship, having won the China Open to not practice as much as he knows he should have and (you guessed it) lost in the opening round. So out of the top players in the world, there really is only one player that has it right and that is Masters, Welsh Open and Champion of Champions winner Ronnie O'Sullivan.
Just a final grumble from me on this event now. I'm starting to get a little bit sick and tired of watching every event and seeing a few things. Firstly, I'm sick and tired of seeing the same players play every game on the TV table, regardless of who they are playing, before they get knocked out. The Welsh Open personified this with only having 1 TV table from the Last 64 to the Final, with Barry Hawkins being able to get to the semi-finals without actually being on TV for 1 minute of his campaign. TV companies need to find some sort of rotation policy so that regular fans aren't stuck with seeing the same names day in day out on the Televised table(s). Another grumble, this time about table conditions. I'm sick and tired of seeing the same poor table conditions at every event, without anything seemingly being done by the governing body to get it sorted despite research being done left, right and centre to find the cause of kicks and bad bounces, and the BBC even showed a feature at The Masters with Shaun Murphy having done extensive research in to what causes kicks, yet still slow progress is being made. In fact the main table was even seen to have a slight roll on more than one occasion in the semi-finals which wasn't being caused by finger marks. Finally, to bring the rant to a close, I'm going to just say a few words on the format. It's shocking that a respected world ranking event in the UK has to be played over a best-of-7 frames format from the Last 128 to the Last 16 with the quarter-finals being best-of-9 frames. This is really only for one reason and that is to fit it all in, with 4 tables and a roll-on roll-off system also being deployed. To me, until the semi-finals it really did feel like we were watching a slightly higher market PTC event, and when the Welsh Open is moved to Cardiff next year I hope they have a serious think about the format and structure of the event.
Other than that I really enjoyed a good week of snooker, and I'm now looking forward to the next thing on the snookering agenda which is the Championship League winners group on Wednesday and Thursday.
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