As September is quite thin on the ground when it comes to
main tour events, and the Shanghai Masters is really the only main event,
despite already giving him my Player of the Month nomination, I think that for
winning the Shanghai Masters as a qualifier Kyren Wilson certainly deserves the
Moment of the month nomination on top of that.
Having detailed how he got there with all of the wins during
the main stages of the event, here in the moment of the month piece I want to
talk more about what it means for him and the game of snooker, as this wider
context is more of what big moments are about.
Coming into the Shanghai Masters Kyren was the 53rd
seed which meant he actually had to play three qualifying matches, as this
event was still taking place on the old tiered system as opposed to the new
flat 128 draws. Those matches were played in August a month before the main
stages actually took place, and were played at the Barnsley Metrodome, which
isn’t exactly a lot compared to the venue and surroundings of Shanghai so it is
a tough thing to come through.
When it came to the tournament itself it wasn’t even plain
sailing getting out there for Kyren. On September 11th he tweeted:
“Flying to Shanghai tonight and my visa’s only just turned up #phew #twitching”.
Just imagine for a second if Wilsons visa had not have turned up and he was
forced to pull out of the event. A life changing moment for him would never
have happened, and who knows how long it may have taken him to win a ranking
event if it had not have been achieved then.
He’d already survived one major scare before getting on the
plane to make the journey. Even when the main event did come around he still
had a wildcard round match to deal with. That’s never a nice position. Having
paid all of the costs for flights and hotels being beaten in a wildcard round
game would be the ultimate insult. You’re under pressure from ball one because
you would expect to win but the wildcard player has nothing to lose and will be
very much used to conditions having grown up playing all of their snooker in
them.
Once that was negotiated for Wilson he could feel like he
was a real part of the tournament, but he certainly wouldn’t have been a
favourite against Joe Perry in the Last 32. Looking back on all of the players
Kyren had to play, Joe Perry, Michael Holt, Ding Junhui, Mark Allen and Judd
Trump. His opponents were very much heavy favourites to win, except against Hitman
Holt in the Last 16 when the bookies were a little more cautious.
The other thing that struck me is that the whole thing was
by no means a fluke. A 5-1 win against Perry, a 5-1 win against Holt, a 6-1 win
in the semi-finals against Mark Allen. He dominated those games from the start
and was able to finish them off in style. He also showed some great battling
qualities in the wins against Ding Junhui and Judd Trump in deciding frames. He
wasn’t fazed by Ding pulling back to 3-3 from 3-1 down and he wasn’t fazed when
Judd came back to 8-7 from 8-4 or 9-9 from 9-7. He still had the nerve and
bottle to get over the line. The bottle is the sign of a champion as that is
the one thing that quite simply, not everyone has.
The mark of a real magic moment is when is a moment that
people can come back to, not just in the coming months but for years to come.
That is certainly what we have here with Wilson. The win got him into the
Champion of Champions where he went on to make the semi-finals. He now has the
chance to use the security of that win in the rankings to really build and make
it into the top 16 in the next year, and I believe that I will be writing about
Wilson in features like this for many a year to come. That is why Kyren Wilson
winning the Shanghai Masters as a qualifier, away from home for his first
ranking title, is my moment of the month for September.
I hope you've had a wonderful bank holiday Monday and will return tomorrow to see October's nomination.
No comments:
Post a Comment