Table for two.
A rather lacklustre World Championship so far sparked into life on Wednesday with the conclusion of the quarter finals with two of them going very close, so we’re now set up to see four Englishmen battle it out over the next three days to see who can make the two day final.
This first day of the semi finals always bothers me a bit I have to say, I understand that the table fitters have to move through the night to transform The Crucible from it’s previous guise to the one table situation but I’d still prefer there to be three sessions today with one of the semi-finals reaching the half way stage rather than backloading them on Saturday.
It’s a bit of a nothing day today and having both matches have just their final session on Saturday seems a much fairer schedule than the bottom half semi potentially having to play as many as 15 frames the day before the final with a morning and an evening session. It seems a little unfair on the winner of that match going into the final if they’ve had a late night the night before, not just playing, but with all the media demands and moody BBC montage film shoots that follow their win.
Anyway, as people say these days ‘it is what it is’, which to me is a really irritating phrase only used by people who either can’t be arsed changing things or haven’t got the intellectual capacity to at least have a conversation about it.
It is what it is because it is and you can’t be arsed thinking about changing it.
Anyway, another thing that ‘is what it is’ is my current period of reflection which is my Twitter suspension. This lifts in time for the conclusion of the semi-finals on Saturday, in the meantime you can follow me here where you will be able to find out in real time when the century of centuries bet flagged up at 17/2 at the start of the championship lands, my guess being that this will happen before a ball is struck in the final. With us needing only ten more for the remainder of the championship the bookies will have had to break into the arena armed with spanners for it not to land now surely Shirley?
Right, let’s have a look at the matches. Click on the match to take you to the previous head to head encounters courtesy of the anorak heaven at Cue Tracker.
Semi Final 1 Stuart Bingham v Mark Selby
Thursday 1pm, Friday 10am/7pm, Saturday 2.30pm
Stuart Bingham has already used up all the frames in two of his matches here and it doesn’t get any easier as he lines up to face the new championship favourite Selby. In the preview to the Williams bulldozer job I described Selby as being similar to an inquisitive child dismantling a train set to discover it’s inner workings, well he’s now moved through this phase and is now operating on small animals to fix them and see how organs work, but in the case of Williams he forgot to resuscitate. The way Selby is playing nobody left in this field will beat him, it’s just a case of how many he will win by, but The Crucible does strange things and there is always the possibility that he’ll throw in a bad session just when his opponent is stepping on the accelerator. I think that’s the only way he can be beaten in this match, for Stuart to have a session of no-miss snooker and keep him at bay from then on. The one thing however that Stuart can take into this is his previous record against Mark, which is pretty good. But I think Selby still feels he has a score to settle after last year’s championship when he was clearly thoroughly cheesed off with how Ronnie treated both him and the game towards the end of their semi-final. I’d bet if you asked him he’d rather have been playing O’Sullivan here to get his revenge.
Prediction: Selby 17-9
Bet: Bingham to have the highest break of the match at 5/4
Semi Final 2 Kyren Wilson v Shaun Murphy
Thursday 7pm, Friday 2.30pm, Saturday 10am/7pm
The final of the 2020 Welsh Open is a memory that Kyren Wilson will want to remove from his thoughts as he steps into the arena to face a rejuvenated Shaun Murphy. A 9-1 drubbing in that being the latest in Shaun’s series of wins over The Warrior. If you discount Wilson’s 2-0 win in a recent Mickey Mouse event at Milton Keynes, he’s not beaten Shaun in nearly a decade although they’ve never played anything like a match of this prestige before. Kyren is definitely a Crucible player these days, much like Barry Hawkins of old and Anthony McGill he inevitably turns on his A game whenever he emerges from behind the curtain. Murphy on the other hand is very much a player who just needs a crowd to show off to, wherever that might be. His game has suffered badly during lockdown in terms of results but as he made clear after beating Judd, it’s meant he’s had time with Chris Henry to fix things and he’s clearly found something that he’d been lacking just at the right time. We could see another thriller here come Super Saturday night and it’s impossible to call if it goes to the wire. But I’ll side with Kyren just based on how he’s been closing out matches, I think to win, Shaun will need to have a decent lead going into the final session.
Prediction: Wilson 17-13
Bet: Wilson -2.5 frames at 5/4
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