The Betfair Contrarian: Why the World Snooker Championship won't be won by an Englishman

Baize Betting / The Betfair Contrarian / 23 April 2008 / Leave a Comment

The Betfair Contrarian is back: this time he's telling us why the winner of the 888.com Snooker World Championship will

If there is one thing English sportsmen can generally be relied on to do, it's screw things up. No matter how firmly victory appears to be in his grasp, the Englishman will still find a way to somehow stick his head straight into the jaws of defeat.

So despite the fact that half of the 32-man field in the World Snooker Championship is English, you should ignore the odds of [1.86] on Betfair on an Englishman being crowned champion on 5 May. Here are six reasons why:

As with everything else, England doesn't dominate like it used to.

While England reign supreme historically in the snooker, only four of the last sixteen World Snooker Championship winners have been English. Compounding the misery is the fact that Scots have claimed the crown two years in a row by overcoming Englishmen, and there hasn't been an all-English final since 1989.

The lop-sided draw doesn't help.

With 16 of the 32 competitors coming from England, the chances of an English triumph look like a 50/50 shot. The weighting of the draw, however, hinders the chances of most Englishmen reaching the latter stages.

The bottom half of the draw features 13 of the 16, but also includes the highly-fancied Scot Stephen Maguire, which means the English competitors will eliminate each other only for the last man standing to be knocked off by Maguire.

Conversely, the top half is filled with 13 non-English competitors, so while it includes the top English player Ronnie O'Sullivan, he will have to beat the strongest opponents from outside of England in every round to make the final.

The Englishmen have already started to fall.

The other two Englishman in the top half, Mark Davis and Stephen Lee, have already been eliminated, meaning that Ronnie O'Sullivan will have to overcome four foreign opponents to reach the final or one final berth will be guaranteed English-free.

It is by far the toughest half of the draw, as his second round opponent will be two-time champion Mark Williams and he will then have to overcome the likes of reigning champion John Higgins, seven-time winner Stephen Hendry and the enigmatic Ding Junhui just to reach the final.

Selby has gone already.

The world number four, and England's strongest representative in the bottom half of the draw, Mark Selby, suffered a first-round defeat to fellow countryman Mark King, who has never been beyond the last 16.

The second strongest English player in the bottom half of the draw, 2002 winner Peter Ebdon, didn't look very convincing in his first match, scraping past debutant Jamie Cope 10-9.

This means that the only two realistic hopes of English victory are Ronnie O'Sullivan and Shaun Murphy but...

Murphy isn't actually that great...

In the three years since Shaun Murphy's World Championship win, he has only been victorious in one tournament - the Malta Cup - which he won in 2006 and 2007. During that time. he has failed to make the final at the Crucible again.

...and Ronnie O'Sullivan is too unreliable.

Nobody will argue that Ronnie O'Sullivan is untouchable as the best player in the world on his day, but that day comes all too rarely at the Crucible.

In the last six years he has only reached one World Championship final, which isn't good enough form to make him a safe bet as the most likely English winner.