Breakthrough Brecel victory offers reinvigorating boost to snooker

Let’s go back just a few weeks. The Tour Championship, one of the World Snooker Tour’s marquee events, is taking place in Hull’s Bonus Arena. It’s an event for the creme de la creme of the game, featuring only the top eight players, and one which pulls in top TV ratings. And for much of the week’s play, it is plagued by empty seats.

For all snooker’s merits and global reach, it is not a sport which has enjoyed a great time of late. The Covid-19 pandemic put a halt to its vast range of events in China, which proved a big blow to its opportunities and continued Asian expansion. The sport is currently in the grip of a major match-fixing scandal which has embroiled ten of its professional players. To add insult to injury, the hearing into these allegations began smack in the middle of this year’s World Championship.

If things weren’t quite bad enough, the head of the sport’s governing body, Steve Dawson, and its leading star Ronnie O’Sullivan recently got embroiled in a public set-to over the state of the game. In an interview, O’Sullivan bemoaned the present state of the game and was met with a strong retort from Dawson, who called on him to act as a better “role model” for the game. Ouch.

It all left the game in need of a bit of a feelgood story. The news early on in this year’s World Championship that, at long last, the professional circuit will return to China certainly helped. But it needed a boost that only the Crucible can provide. That magical, mystical venue always somehow manages to serve up the goods, and whatever the perks of the sport’s many leading major events, the World Championship stands tall above them all.

Last year, the headlines were all about O’Sullivan, who levelled Stephen Hendry’s modern record of seven world titles with a superb victory over Judd Trump. But this year’s championship was all about new blood.

Stories of an endemic crisis in snooker have been largely overstated. But the sport was undoubtedly going through a challenging period. Brecel’s flashy victory and Juahui’s flair-driven play provides much hope for the future of the game

First enter Si Juahui. The cool and collected 20-year-old Chinese player edged out 2005 champion Shaun Murphy in the first round. His attractive attacking play endeared many and sent him all the way to the last four. The first debutant to make the semi-final since 1995 and the youngest person to do so since 1996, it was a refreshing bolt out of the blue.

And he may well have gone further, were it not for one Belgian Bullet. Staring defeat in the face, few would have imagined that Luca Brecel could pull off the comeback of all comebacks, winning 12 out of 13 frames from 5-14 down to make his first final.

The tournament was set up for a perfectly matched final. Brecel was to take on one of the greatest Crucible titans of them all, Mark Selby, the four-time champion. It is testament to Selby’s talents and grit that even after falling 6-2 and then 9-8 behind after the opening day’s sessions, many still backed ‘The Jester from Leicester’ to pull a rabbit out of his hat on Monday.

It just wasn’t to be. A superb third session of the final ensued, as Brecel knocked in four centuries and established a 15-10 lead. A Selby revival followed in the final session, but it wasn’t enough. The same sharp snooker which had got Brecel to the final got him through it.

Beyond appeals to neutrality and even-handedness, I doubt World Snooker could have wanted a better outcome to this World Championship than the one they have got. The first ever world champion from mainland Europe and the youngest since 2005, Brecel’s victory could open the floodgates for talent from both his own nation and a somewhat untapped market on the continent. Professional events in the region could well follow as the game seeks to hunt down its next generation.

But more than anything, it has been an exciting and energising injection of energy into a slightly flagging sport. Stories of an endemic crisis in snooker have been largely overstated. But the sport was undoubtedly going through a challenging period. Brecel’s flashy victory and Juahui’s flair-driven play provides much hope for the future of the game. The BBC’s Hazel Irvine described the tournament as “joyous”. It’s hard to disagree. The sport may well have turned a corner.