snooker world championship final

haha yeah i reckon that case is CURSED i tells ya! he'll never make it!!!

I didn't see all of it but that was some boring crap today.

I'd rather watch a 3rd place play-off with Marcu Fu and Ronnie (using a bent pub cue with a rattle and a shiny tip).

11:40pm and we've still got three frames to go tonight. It's like Harold Solomon and Eddie Dibbs playing 85-stroke rallies at Roland Garros in the '70s.

Someone just invoked the 3:51am finish between Thorburn and Griffiths in '83. Come on lads, beat that.

yeah come on match of the day on the graveyard slot - not a bad result given that its bloody spurs getting OUR champions league place!!

Dott just cracked the most enormous yawn on camera. I know how he feels. Last frame of the day, only eighteen points on the board, reds clinging to the top cushion - this could go until 1:15am easily.

N-night.

If it goes to the final frame then god knows what day it will finish. And I doubt as many people will stay up as what happened in the Davis V Taylor final. I think most people in my school stayed up for that.

That last frame resolved itself pretty quickly, as it happens :-) but yeah, lets have it less 'hardcore', plz!

Peter Ebdon will kill any chance of snooker ever getting 85-style rating figures ever again.

I feel a bit sorry for Dott. He demolished Ronnie O'Sullivan and everyone talked about cue tips and mental breakdowns (despite him humping Ronnie 5-0 only a few weeks ago).

Now if he wins it'll be all "Well done Graeme, you won the worst final of the modern era. We didn't think it possible to bore Ebdon of all people into submission but you did it! Can you fuck off now?"

Ronnie's the only seat in town these days, and he's frankly not good enough. With his talent he should have dominated the last decade as Hendry and Davis did before him.

O'Sullivan _is_ good enough though, this is the point. I don't think I've seen a competitor who had a greater skill level than all his competitors since Jahangir Khan was holding it down in the squash world 20 years prior. The only problem is him, he's got so many problems I get the feeling we're gonna be dealing with this decade's Bobby Fischer.

Having the skills doesn't make you good enough. Match winning is about mental strength as much as an ability to hit great shots. Ronnie's shown time and time again that he struggles when *anything* doesn't go according to plan. On a good day he can steamroller anyone in the game. His problem is that unlike Hendry and Davis, he can't win on a bad day.

Hahah crappy slow-mo shots with Dennis Taylor claiming they'd never realised until now that when you skelp a ball it bounces about a bit. Isn't technology wonderful?

A 66 and a 78 in the first two frames today. Looking a bit more promising.

The trouble with snooker is that there are only about 4 personalities left, and they're all in Ronnie O'Sullivan's head.

true

:)

The BBC frame-by-frame guy must be bored shitless:

Frame 20: Like a couple of chimps in London Zoo, Ebdon and Dott continue to scratch about as the match approaches the mid-session interval. Yet again, both men have chances. Dott breaks down after a 62 break before Ebdon misses a straight-forward yellow when overstretching. Dott then fluffs a snooker, leaving Ebdon to pot the yellow and lay a snooker of his own. Dott is unable to escape, but then flukes a snooker of his own and manages to flop over the line. A big psychological frame for Dott.
Ebdon 7-13 Dott

Yeah, I support Ronnie by default these days, since I finally accepted that Jimmy White's never going to win the thing. Boreathon safety slugging, technical stuff, pah. Give me a maverick risk-taker any day of the week.

Ebdon and Dott can fuck off (except that I like when Scottish people win stuff, with the exception of Stephen Hendry)

xpost, that's brilliant. I wish he'd said "scratch their arses" though.

Random ex-international cricketers painting in the studio!

Three games in a row for Ebdon. There could be life in this yet. He was 15-7 down, now 15-10, with 18 needed to win it.

27min/frame average yesterday so, if it does go all the way tonight (thanks to another truncated six-frame session this afternoon), we're looking at a 1:30am finish with viewing figures that make Nathan Barley look like The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show.

I don't think I've seen a competitor who had a greater skill level than all his competitors since Jahangir Khan was holding it down in the squash world 20 years prior

Hmm, odd comparison. I thought the thing about JK was his astonishing mental toughness; he wasn't the most audacious shot-maker, he just used to out-last his opponents. 555 consecutive wins, wasn't it? Ronnie can rarely manage 5. Perhaps a better comparison is with Roger Federer or - better - John McEnroe. McEnroe was more or less the best in the world for about four years but genuinely untouchable for a 15-month spell in the middle (i.e. what Federer's been doing to everyone for the last 2.5 years) - but then imploded. McEnroe annihilating Connors for the loss of four games in the '84 Wimbledon final and then shambling to a similarly humbling defeat vs Curren twelve months later was very Ronnie.

Unbiased and not-at-all-bored frame-by-frame dude on teh beeb about Ebdon:

He will fancy this now - and I might stick a bet on him to win.

Hahaha. How can I get this job?

Frame eight: Peter Ebdon must have walked in front of several black cats, while smashing a mirror or two for good measure, during the interval. To say he is not getting the run of the balls would be an understatement.

I am losing the will to live.

You, me, the bloke doing the updates on the BBC website...(not that he's had anything to write since this frame's been going for about 18 years)

I started pushing pins under my fingernails and pulling my teeth about 30 minutes ago.

Jesus Christ. An hour and fifteen minutes. And there could still be another seven frames or so.

Frame 27: The combatants go into the trenches for this one - an absolute 'grueller'. Dott moves 40 ahead but, once again, breaks down. A tense safety exchange commences, during which Ebdon misses a number of long reds. Dott then lays a snooker behind the brown which Ebdon misses twice. Dott, with the frame at his mercy, then misses opportunities to wrap up the frame, rattling the jaws with a couple of reds. Ebdon and Dott then take turns missing the green before Ebdon, heart bursting through his waist-coat, mops up. The frame, at 74 minutes, is the longest in Crucible history.
Ebdon 12-15 Dott

hahah i love this guy

Peter wins the next in one visit!

Despite its almost heroic dullness, this match has now taken on such epic proportions that it might be misremembered as some sort of classic in years to come. No-one remembers that the first 86min of Arsenal-ManU in '79 was crap or that McEnroe-Borg in '80 was a bit duff for the first two and a half hours.

15-13.

I can't stay up for this - I have to get up early in the morning! Perhaps they'll still be playing.

Peter Ebdon is bringing shame upon the town of Wellingborough.

As far as the whole O'sullivan thing I mean yeah, he has that much more skill than almost anybody, except from perharps Mark Williams and John Higgins being the only ones capable of running him close. And bcz of that it might've been harder to dominate the game than when Hendry was around (only Jimmy White and no-one else). The other thing is the kind of ppl that *dominate* really have a very ice-like personality; it ususally goes hand-in-hand, and the reason that O'sullivan is compelling is how his emotions are laid bare on the table - its probably just me but whenever someone is really too dominant (Sampras, Hendry) I'm always cheering on the opponent.

Dott has just won, amazingly enough - 16-13.

It has a momentum now, this match - a sort of slow accumulation of interest in its sheer sprawl. But its badness was summed up in the last frame when Ebdon cockily asked the ref what the highest break of the tournament was before missing a pink by several feet at 84.

Ebdon goes in off when threatening to overhaul a huge deficit in frame 29. Concedes. 16-13.

(Pam is asleep on the couch and has been for about two hours).

I worry just what Ebbo might do if he wins this, prone as he is to embarrassing outbursts. I can see the shirt coming off and some random punter getting punched out in his frenzy.

I'm crashing. This might go on past two in the morning at this rate.

I'm taking the laptop to bed and turning the portable telly on. I, too, have to be up early tomorrow but first day back after a bank holiday weekend is always a doddle, isn't it? Isn't it?

the last sesh hasn't been so bad - Ebdon has looked is at his most fluent, it was just "funny" how, in this very same sesh, the longest of the match/tournament played out. xp - think'll beat the record for the longest finish to a final.

I think the only solution is to put all Chinese snooker players in evil-looking masks to give a kind of pro-wrestling razzmatazz appeal to the sport.

I missed this one from earlier:

Ebdon, who usually wears the look of a man about to be blasted into outer space, does a nifty pirouette and mops up brown, blue and pink. Game on.
Ebdon 9-15 Dott

BC guy/gal is better than the match (which is admittedly picking up after the 75 minute marathon).

Dott looks shattered.

BC=BBC

They need to up the piss-taking quotient if they're going to push past the Thorburn-Griffiths mark and into Tuesday daylight. 4am and they could deliver the trophy on a milk float.

16-14.

(I think the Beeb are copping the Guardian Unlimited style of irreverent reportage, which reached some kind of zenith with USA-Mexico in the 2002 World Cup..."top-bodied the sphere into the score bag" or somesuch).

The match passes the thirteen hour mark. The people in the studio may well realise how much they're fighting a losing battle - Parrott just came out with "I don't mind watching snooker like this."

Clive Everton comes up with quote of the championship:

"Dott resting his eyes - it's pretty bright under those lights."

Helluva clearance from Dott. I think we may get a decent night's sleep after all. Or at least this will be over before my laptop battery gives out.

(17-14, btw)

And here's a sports psychologist to offer virtually no insight whatsoever.

That was a fantastic frame. Dott looked fucked when he missed that black off the spot then he comes back with a ballsy clearance and gives it an old-skool Ebdon "COME ON!"

I'm starting to enjoy this.

17-14. Dormy.

There's something aesthetically displeasing about the b and the d in Ebdon.

Now officially the latest finish to a Crucible final ever.

He's not "dormy"! You can't halve the world snooker final! That would be a fitting climax though.

The BBC site isn't updating. I think the guys finally fallen asleep.