Perhaps when you weigh everything up, it is only right that this unique World Snooker Championship belongs to Ronnie O’Sullivan. There are many words you could use to describe the six-times world champion away from the baize, but when it comes to moments such as these, there are simply not enough superlatives for snooker’s great ringmaster.
You wondered whether the impact of fans being unable to attend the majority of this year’s event would stunt the flow of the sport’s big names. Not O’Sullivan. You often wonder how the tag of overwhelming favourite can play on the mind of a sportsman in a final. Not O’Sullivan, who had realistically put this final to bed long before he formally did so at 7.47pm on Sunday evening.
Maybe the final scoreline was harsh on Kyren Wilson, who has emerged as one of the sport’s true stars of the future on the way to his first world final. In any other final, against any other opponent, the chances he missed on Sunday afternoon when the final definitively went against him would have not been so costly.
O’Sullivan is now just one behind Stephen Hendry’s record of seven world titles, but what next for snooker’s unpredictable enigma? “If I happen to win another that will be fantastic,” he said afterwards. “If I don’t, I’ve had a wonderful career and snooker has given me many pleasurable moments. If I wanted to go out and break records I wouldn’t play as well.”
After limping his way to a three-frame overnight lead on Saturday, you always felt as though snooker’s true rock and roll star had something special up his sleeve. O’Sullivan was inside the Crucible from 9am on Sunday morning practising, and just a few hours later he had won the afternoon session 7-1 to move 17-8 ahead.
So stunned was Wilson by O’Sullivan’s brilliance that at one stage, that he attempted to leave the arena following the penultimate frame of the afternoon, only to be reminded that there was still one more chastening frame for him to go through.
Hendry’s seven world titles is the only record that O’Sullivan is left to mop up in a sport that he has revolutionised over the last quarter of a century. In truth, O’Sullivan is Lionel Messi. He is Roger Federer. He is Phil Taylor. He transcends his sport with his popularity and the way he plays the game.
O’Sullivan, typically for him, however, preferred his own comparisons. “I’ve watched a bit of Del Boy and Rodney [before matches],” he said. “Laila [Rouass, his fiancee] says I’m like Rodney. Ronnie the plonker, rather than Rodney the plonker, maybe.” Few would agree with that summation, you suspect.
At times on Sunday afternoon, O’Sullivan looked incapable of missing. He played with such minimal ambidextrous effort that you felt every single mistake Wilson made - and yes, there were several – was going to be punished. More often than not, O’Sullivan duly obliged. From a laborious, error-strewn display on Saturday to the brilliance of : few, if any, players can go between such extremes in just a few short hours.
Brutally, Wilson was given just one opportunity to pot a ball in the evening session. When he did so, running into the pack and out of position, it felt like a microcosm of his final. The key moments went against Wilson here, but he will be back, and he will surely be a world champion of the future. He will just hope he doesn’t run into O’Sullivan in this mood again.
O’Sullivan’s claims earlier in the tournament that the sport’s lower-ranked players would not even be “half-decent amateurs” were outlandish and, given the improvement in the depth of the professional tour, unfair. But even now, 23 years on from the record-breaking 147 that announced his arrival at the Crucible, snooker still needs him more than he needs snooker.
After breaks of 73, 75 and 71 in the afternoon session, the job was as good as done. When he strolled his way to the match-winning break of 96 within minutes of entering the arena on Sunday evening, even Wilson couldn’t help but applaud what he had just seen first hand.
There are already an overwhelming majority within snooker who believe O’Sullivan is indisputably the greatest player ever to pick up a cue. As he lifted the sport’s most prestigious prize above his head for a sixth time, you felt that even the few detractors remaining must now concede defeat and accept that O’Sullivan is in a league all of his own.
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