Snooker has a new grandmaster of the baize – but unlike so many of his predecessors, the story of Kyren Wilson has been far from straightforward.
As the ticker tape rained down over the 32-year-old on Monday evening, and he fulfilled his childhood dream by becoming snooker’s newest world champion, Wilson could have been forgiven for thinking back to the bumps in the road which brought him to this point. The boy who was convinced to take up snooker as a six-year-old by Peter Ebdon has not done it the easy way.
At the age of only 19, Wilson dropped off the professional tour after just a solitary season among the elite. He returned to his home town of Kettering, combining practice sessions with a job behind a bar at Barratts in nearby Northampton, the venue where he used to pot balls and dream of squaring off against the world’s best players. His parents remortgaged their home to help their son fulfil his dream.
On two separate occasions Wilson tried and failed to reclaim his place on the tour at Q School, essentially becoming an amateur player. Had he failed a third time, he openly admitted in the aftermath of this victory that he and his wife were potentially going to look at opportunities away from snooker.
But as his nickname emphasises, Wilson is a warrior and here, having already fallen short in the biggest game of them all against Ronnie O’Sullivan four years ago, this time he was able to go one step further and be crowned champion of the world by ending the Welsh qualifier Jak Jones’s dream run to the final.
Nobody, not even the sport’s experts, would have predicted this being Wilson’s year, though.
He had not won a ranking event all year and although he arrived in Sheffield as a seed, he was far from one of the favourites.
But over the course of the past fortnight, he has displayed the game and temperament that had led so many to tip him for years as a future world champion.
Wilson promised he would be better for the pain of his defeat by O’Sullivan in the 2020 final and he came true on that promise here. “It’s like a Rocky Balboa story,” he smiled. “I’ve had to go back to a grotty gym and find myself again. I’ve given everything. I was robbed of this in the Covid final. I will never forget this moment.”
In truth, this year’s final went a long way towards being decided in Sunday’s opening session. Wilson won it 7-1, with the 30-year-old Jones admitting he didn’t sleep a wink on Saturday evening after his semi-final victory over Stuart Bingham, fuelling himself on energy drinks.
But in the two sessions that followed, Jones recomposed himself, winning them 9-8 – but Wilson was always in control, especially when he began the final session 15-10 ahead. Jones, the world No 44, certainly made it nervy in reducing the gap to 17-14 and while he ultimately fell short, he leaves Sheffield £200,000 richer and with a place in the world’s top 16.
“I just gave myself too much to do in the first session,” Jones said. “But Kyren came out flying in that first session. He deserves it.”
Wilson won three of the first four frames in the evening session on Monday, the most significant coming when he won a frame on a respotted black with an audacious – and somewhat fortuitous – three-cushion pot to move one away from the title.
But as has been the case throughout Wilson’s whole career, the final steps on his road to glory in Sheffield were not simple.
Breaks of 67 and 96 – the latter of which was a genuine 147 attempt before Jones missed the 13th red – narrowed the gap to four before another break of 53 made it 17-14. “I think if I’d won one more, at 17-15, he could have really started twitching,” Jones said.
Eventually though, Wilson held his nerve. His two breaks of 29 and 42 in frame 32 were not the best of his career, but they were the most important. The release of emotion as he roared out loud before bursting into tears when potting the winning balls underlined how much it meant to a player who has scrapped and fought so hard to reach this point.
Wilson graciously said after his defeat against O’Sullivan: “The night belongs to Ronnie.”
This time though, four years later in a packed-out auditorium, the night – and the sport of snooker – belonged to a player who has reached the summit the hard way.
