Hector Nunns - The Crucibles Greatest Matches: Forty Years of Snookers World Championship in Sheffield

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2017
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

Hector Nunns, 2017

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Print ISBN 978-1-78531-284-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-334-9

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To Sarah, Rebecca and Rosie

By World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn

W HEN Hector asked me if I would write the foreword for this book, I was only too happy to do so and agreed immediately.

Snookers World Championship is one of the great sporting events of the year not just in the United Kingdom, but now followed worldwide by hundreds of millions of people.

And since 1977 it has taken place in a small arena in Sheffield, England going by the name of the Crucible Theatre, a true theatre of dreams for all professional snooker players.

There is little doubt that this iconic and uniquely atmospheric venue adds to the tournament itself, for the players, the television viewers, and also the thousands who make the annual pilgrimage to South Yorkshire to watch the action live.

There have been so many great matches at the Crucible over the years and I doubt you could find two people anywhere who would agree exactly on a long list of them. But you can have a go, and that is what Hector has done in this book, one that certainly includes several of the enduring classics that most aficionados like me would name.

It is a fine addition to the snooker literature out there, and a subject that was well worthy of the effort and overdue for more consideration. Each match is offered as a separate story and readers can cherry-pick and dip in and out of it at their leisure.

Everyone will have their own favourites, and there is something for everyone going right back to the early years, featuring the most famous names and contests the sport has seen in Sheffield. And as for those included or excluded that cause offence, thats a good pub argument waiting to happen!

Unlike a lot of sports snooker can be a slow burner, the tension builds minute by minute, frame by frame, hour by hour and especially at the Crucible where the matches are the longest we see. It is a great British eccentricity of an event, but a semi-final lasting three days? Tell that to the Americans!

But it is so English, who else would do it? A match at the Crucible is like reading a long book with a series of plot twists, and you are gripped but dont know until the final page what will happen.

My own greatest match at the Crucible is obviously a highly personal one, but it can only be and will always be the 1981 final between Steve Davis and Doug Mountjoy. It was a mission for us, the player and his manager, to win the World Championship.

When Steve won it, it was the culmination of everything he and I had dreamed about and worked towards. To this day it is the one sporting event I think about first, and stands out head and shoulders above the rest and I have been involved in and attended a few of those.

And I cant lie, it was a pivotal moment in both our careers and I will never forget that or take it for granted. A couple of blokes who came from council houses, fulfilling a dream, the dream since Steve signed a contract with me up against a lamp post in Blackpool in 1978.

It wasnt panic but this was his chance in 1981, he had to do it now because he hadnt been the overnight sensation I thought he would be against the big boys.

I never sat in the arena for Steves matches, but in that final session I did with my wife Susan, and as it got nearer the winning line I was telling myself not to do anything stupid. It might have also been a huge moment for me, but it was Steves moment And then of course he pots the pink and I am on the dance floor, hitting him with a rugby tackle that would have knocked out most second rows in what was the greatest sporting moment in my life.

In recent years one of the constants on the professional circuit has been the presence of Hector in the media centre or on the end of the phone, battling to get snooker coverage in the face of an ever more competitive marketplace, and with so many pages of national newspapers devoted to football.

His enthusiasm for the sport shines through. I know both he and the many playing legends interviewed for this book enjoyed the experience, and he is very well qualified to write this book having covered the sport, good stories and occasionally bad, for 15 years.

I hope you enjoy reading it,

Barry Hearn,

Chairman,

World Snooker,

January 2017.

by Hector Nunns

I CAN still recall very clearly my own first visit to the Crucible Theatre to watch the World Championship live even though the experience was thrillingly brief.

It was in 1996 and a good friend of mine Russ Bryan, who made the pilgrimage every year with his much-loved grandfather and knowing I was a huge fan and studying at that time at Sheffield University, suggested I meet up with them and come along.

My ticket was for the middle session of a best-of-25-frames quarter-final between two young pups with a bit of ability and these days a few trophies between them, a certain Ronnie OSullivan and John Higgins, both at that time without a world title but ready to challenge the 1990s hegemony of Stephen Hendry.

So the first frame I ever saw at the iconic venue was a characteristically effortless century break (102) from the man known to all as the Rocket, something that arguably set some kind of tone for much of what I was to see in later years both as a spectator and then for the past 15 years as a journalist covering the tournament.

Snooker is a sport that has captured my imagination ever since my late uncle James Nunns first let me loose on a full-size table at Effingham Golf Club in Surrey. I believe it is still there; the room was grand, and dark bar the actual table lighting, atmospheric and a little foreboding. I must have been about ten and although the game seemed impossible, the possibilities appeared limitless.

I watched the World Championship on TV from 1979 but also saw snooker live at the old Wembley Conference Centre in the 1980s and early 1990s, sitting among sell-out 2,500 crowds for matches featuring the likes of Alex Higgins and Jimmy White. For those two in particular these tended to be raucous affairs that as a spectator often felt more like being in the away end at a football match.

But this, the Crucible, was different. Unlike at the Conference Centre, where you could barely see the balls if sitting right at the back, spectators from almost any vantage point felt as if they were part of the arena, so close were they to the action.

Those lucky individuals sitting on the front row could have reached out and touched the players, though that might have earned them a speedy exit from the premises.