Neal Foulds reflects on Wu Yize's stunning World Championship final victory over Shaun Murphy at the Crucible, which signals a new dawn in snooker.
What a final. What a World Championship. What a winner in Wu Yize.
It’s hard to know quite where to start when trying to sum up the last 17 days at the Crucible. A World Championship we’ll remember for a very long time, I think.
We’ll start with the last two days and an amazing final played to a wonderfully high standard, full of drama and some of the most incredible moments you could imagine. In truth, you could say that about the whole tournament.
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Only four world finals have gone to a deciding frame, the last 24 years ago when Peter Ebdon beat Stephen Hendry 18-17 in 2002. The irony here is that Ebdon was in the losing corner this time, as coach of Shaun Murphy who, it must be said, played his heart out in defeat.
Quite often, the world champion is the last man standing in Sheffield at the end of a gruelling two and a bit weeks which brings to a close a packed modern-day snooker calendar. But not this year.
The final was one of the best I’ve witnessed at the Crucible, certainly the best in recent times. The talk this morning is that the 2018 final which Mark Williams won over John Higgins was better, but I don’t agree with that. That was a terrific contest, but this year’s final was as good a standard as I’ve seen.
Murphy was outstanding all through the tournament. He beat hot favourite Zhao Xintong in the quarter-finals, outlasted Higgins in the semis, all that having very nearly crashed out in the first round.
The snooker he produced at the end of the first session, beginning of the third, and then all night on Monday was out of this world, and you’d have to say he was unfortunate to have lost.
To play so well in a world final and yet not be victorious must hurt, and we’ll never know what might’ve happened in that deciding frame had the balls been kinder to Murphy. He was unlucky to be badly hampered on the safety shot which led to Wu’s brilliant opening red, that after a cannon on the black had gone astray moments earlier.
But make no mistake, Wu is a deserving champion.
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You can’t argue with the calibre of players he beat to get his hands on the trophy. Mark Selby over three sessions, an on-song Mark Allen over three days, and Murphy, a red-hot former champion, in one of the best Crucible finals of all time. Wu managed to pot the big balls in the big moments when those great players couldn’t.
He continually stepped up and delivered when he needed to, countless times in his pulsating semi-final with Allen, and then all throughout the final. He looked in big trouble when losing five frames in a row at the start of the third session, but somehow found a way to dig out the next three to keep his nose in front. That’s what great champions do.
It wasn’t something he had in his locker 12 months ago, but he’s improving at a rapid rate of knots, and maturing into a quite magnificent snooker player. He’s not the finished article, which is a scary thought, and is still a little rough round the edges. But he’s only going to get better.
Wu is the greatest long potter I’ve ever seen. More than that, he’s shown himself capable of winning when his attacking tools aren’t working at full capacity, and that’s why he’s now the second youngest ever world champion – a remarkable achievement.
As if this year’s tournament needed any extra narrative, Wu’s story is a real rags to riches one which now has a happy ending. He came from a poor background in China, and when his father brought him over to Sheffield at the age of 16, they lived in a windowless room while Wu chased his dream.
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Wu grew up with nothing, came to England with nothing, but has worked tirelessly to overcome those significant challenges to become champion of the world. A triumph in adversity and an uplifting story which makes his victory even more special.
It’s amazing to think that Wu was one black away from losing in the semi-finals, and this year’s World Championship was full of those sliding doors moments.
Murphy himself was on the brink of losing to Fan Zhengyi in round one, who knows how far Ronnie O’Sullivan would’ve gone had he been able to finish off Higgins in the second session of their match, and then of course, a semi-final between Wu and Allen that none of us will ever forget.
Everything is different if Allen pots that seemingly regulation black to win the match 17-15. Of course, nothing is regulation in those circumstances at the Crucible, but I’ve never seen anything like it. I was commentating on the game and the finish was unbelievable.
Credit where it’s due. It was a crushing moment, but Allen managed to put all that to one side to say and do all the right things at the end of the match, which can’t have been easy.
To think, you can play a match for three days and it all comes down to one ball, and that one ball is all anyone is talking about for days after, and I suspect, months and years to come. It was an incredible moment in one of the most dramatic World Championships in recent memory.
That felt like the moment at the time, and still does, but there were plenty of others. The match between O’Sullivan and Higgins lived up to its billing and is one we all savoured, another played to an incredibly high standard as all but one of the seeds made it through to the last 16.
We speak a lot about the Class of 92, and Higgins showed against Murphy that he still has plenty left to offer, yet it feels very much like the changing of the guard has already arrived.
The last two world champions have been Chinese players, young men who aren’t married, instead choosing to devote their lives to their profession in the pursuit of excellence and greatness. The current female world champion is also Chinese.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s been coming for a while, but the Chinese domination is here, and it’s here to stay. In a year from now, Wu and Zhao, champion at the Crucible in 2025, will likely be number one and world number two in the rankings.
On the evidence of the last few months, it’s hard to see who can stop them from dominating the snooker landscape for years to come.
