THERE have been close to a maximum 147 euphemisms rolled out to describe Peter Ebdon’s shameless tactics on Wednesday night, when the former world champion recovered from 10-6 to defeat Ronnie O’Sullivan, the champion, 13-11 in the quarter-finals. The one word that has been absent is the one that crossed my mind while tuning in to that session of excruciating snooker: cheating.
The facts: Ebdon’s average shot time in the final session was a coma-inducing 40 seconds. In the twentieth frame, he took 5min 30sec to compile a break of 12, ten seconds slower than O’Sullivan took to knock in a maximum 147 at the same venue in 1997. He took 3min 5sec for a single shot in the opening frame of the final session, five seconds longer than it took Tony Drago to win an entire frame in 1988. Ken Doherty, a former world champion, said: “I’m a friend of Peter’s, but taking that long is bordering on the ridiculous.”
When asked about his tactics, Ebdon broke into an expression of shocked innocence. “I did not deliberately try to knock Ronnie out of his stride,” he said. “I did not even know what I was doing half the time.”
Pull the other one, Peter. O’Sullivan’s mounting frustration was visible to everyone in the auditorium. In the second frame of the evening, he asked someone in the audience for the time. He spent most of the rest of the session slumped in his chair looking half-asleep and at one point gouged his forehead with his fingernails.
Sport, you see, is about rhythm and it is virtually impossible to get into the groove when your opponent keeps switching the music off. You have got to admire Ebdon’s resourcefulness, though. His water-sipping, slow-walking, head-scratching shenanigans were a masterclass in how to waste time. He had the cue-ball cleaned so often it started to shrink. He will be asking for the Crucible carpets to be cleaned between shots should he get through to the final.
Time-wasting reared its ugly head in table tennis in the 1980s. Desmond Douglas, the turbo-charged former British No 1, faced Ulf Thorsell, of Sweden, in the final of an international competition. The Swede spent a good 30 seconds between points wiping imaginary perspiration from his brow in a successful attempt to knock the affable Englishman out of his stride. “Champion Towel-master” was the subsequent headline.
When the governing body changed the rules so that towelling down could occur only every five points, the time-wasters responded by tying their shoelaces instead. Eventually umpires were encouraged to use their discretion to invoke the catch-all rule that players should not indulge in “ungentlemanly conduct”.
I know — give arbiters enough subjective rope and the egomaniacal fringe of the blazered brigade will hang the sport. But, after Wednesday night, most in snooker would welcome a dose of officiousness if it put a stop to such gruelling gamesmanship.
Yet snooker referees already have the power to clamp down on slow play. The rule states: “If a referee considers that a player is taking an abnormal amount of time over a stroke or selection of strokes he shall warn the player that he is liable to have the frame awarded to his opponent.”
Disgracefully, there was not a peep from Colin Brinded, the jovial referee from Great Yarmouth. There is no suggestion that Brinded was fearful of Ebdon’s position on the board of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, but there is a possible conflict of interest, which needs to be reviewed.
O’Sullivan, too, must take his share of responsibility for failing to question the referee’s apparent spinelessness. As John Parrott, the former world champion, put it: “If it had been me, I would’ve asked the referee if what he was doing was in the rules and I’d have said it loudly enough for everyone to hear me.”
Ebdon was unapologetic after some hostile questioning. “To be honest, I don’t care what people say,” he said. “I won the match. Ronnie is an absolute genius and I have the utmost respect for him.” It is not his attitude to O’Sullivan that is in question, but his respect for the integrity of snooker. In a sport that is now bereft of tobacco sponsorship, Ebdon’s quest for supremacy through monotony could prove to be nothing less than disastrous.
QuoteOriginally Posted by eirebhoy
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