Under the heading AST on the main menu, the average shot times for every single tour player during the 2017/2018 season have been revealed.
This is obviously an interesting statistic to look at ahead of the Snooker Shoot-Out next month where players have time restrictions on each shot and are forced to play much faster than they would normally.
Fastest Players
According to this statistic these are the top 16 fastest players on the tour:
The first thing I spotted here is how many of these players are actually currently in the top 16 of the world rankings. As of the completion of the Scottish Open, number two fastest Ronnie O'Sullivan is also number two in the official world rankings. At number three on the list, Judd Trump also matches his current world ranking, while Mark Williams, Luca Brecel Mark Allen, Ding Junhui, Marco Fu, Shaun Murphy are all in the the world ranked top 16 along with that.
None of the names at the top of the list are particularly surprising, with former Shoot-Out winner Michael White sitting in 12th and fluent scorers like Thepchaiya Un-Nooh, Zhao Xintong and Jack Lisowski all making it into the top eight. Soheil Vahedi is perhaps a name some would not have picked out, but anyone that has watched him a few times will have spotted that he does not hang around, as an average shot time of 19 seconds suggests.
Slowest Players
Mark Williams will be pleased to see Lee Walker standing out as the very slowest player on the snooker tour. The Welshman has been saying for some time how slow Walker is and it will not come as a surprise to many that he is sits last, and deservedly so with an average shot time of 35 seconds.
Rod Lawler and Peter Ebdon are the next two slowest and again that again will not surprise too many people. A couple of new tour players in Ashley Hugill and Lukas Kleckers are also slower than 30 seconds along with players like Paul Davison and Jak Jones who have been involved in their fair share of long matches in the last season or two.
Long time snooker fans would pick Rory McLeod as someone they expect to be nearer the bottom, and while he is in the bottom 20 along with Fergal O'Brien, neither one is as low as I expected, though an average of 29 seconds per shot is certainly not speedy.
Of the 19 slowest players listed here, Anthony Hamilton is the highest ranked by far at 29, showing a clear difference to the ranking of the 16 fastest players which contained 11 players ranked higher than Hamilton alone.
Notable Others
Last season's snooker Shoot-Out winner Anthony McGill features on the list at 96 with an average of 26 seconds, while the 2016 champion Robin Hull has averaged 24 seconds a shot this season and sits in the middle of the table at 66th.
At 23 seconds a shot, world number one and world champion Mark Selby sits 51st on the list. Recent Scottish Open winner Neil Robertson is a second faster than Selby and 14 places higher in 37th, while Ali Carter is 34th, Barry Hawkins 35th, John Higgins 36th and Martin Gould 38th all on the same 22 seconds a shot.
Graeme Dott, someone who has received a bad reputation over the years in some circles for the length of two of the World finals he was involved, is a very high 17th averaging just 20 seconds a shot - surely dispelling the myth that he is in anyway slow.
Could this list help referees?
In 2015 I wrote up a piece on what could be done to combat slow play as it was a real hot topic at this time. In that I mentioned a particular rule stating: "Under Section 4 of the snooker rules, Point 1 Conduct, Part A, the rule specifically states "In the event of (I) a player taking an abnormal amount of time over a stroke or the selection of a stroke...the referee shall either... (V) warn the player that in the event of any such further conduct the frame will be awarded to his opponent."
Knowing who is notoriously a little slower than normal may give the opportunity for referees to challenge these players in the future if they feel play gets to slow in a match.
A guide for the Snooker Shoot-Out?
Can the order of players here tell us anything about potential contenders for a tournament that is considered the biggest lottery in the sport? Probably not.
Here are how the former winners rank:
- Michael White (2015) - 12th
- Barry Hawkins (2012) - 35th
- Martin Gould (2013) - 38th
- Dominic Dale (2014) - 49th
- Robin Hull (2016) - 66th
- Nigel Bond (2011) - 93rd
- Anthony McGill (2017) - 96th
And for further insight the former runners-up in the shoot-out:
- Luca Brecel (2016) - 6th
- Robert Milkins (2011) - 8th
- Mark Allen (2013) - 9th
- Graeme Dott (2012) - 17th
- Stuart Bingham (2014) - 47th
- Xiao Guodong (2015 & 2017) - 56th
Out of these 13 former Shoot-Out finalists, only Nigel Bond and Anthony McGill are in the bottom half of the table for average shot times this season. The halfway mark of 24 seconds a shot where Robin Hull sits could be halved and provide players with time to spare in the first five minutes of a frame in the shoot-out.
However, these players and guys like Bond and McGill at 26 seconds a shot on average would need to go three times quicker than their norm in the second half of a shoot-out frame when the limit is 10 seconds a shot, while the likes of Brecel, Milkins, Allen and White outlined above would only need to go half their normal speed at that stage, which is a much reduced rush.
Whatever you think about the release of these new statistics, hopefully it will pave the way for even more revealing statistics being made public, which there has been a calling for on social media already. Meanwhile, the full list of the tour's average shot times can be viewed through this link.
The referees have warned a few players for being slow before. Dean Reynolds got terribly upset at being warned to speed up by the referee at both of his two most successful World Championships,in 1982 as a teenager in his debut year and again in 1989. Both times it affected his game and he went on to lose tearfully,because he wasn't doing it as gamesmanship he just needed time to ponder all his options properly in a way that more instinctive players didn't.
ReplyDelete