| Report
The Midlands
Universities Snooker Championships, an annual invitation-only event
prior to the national BUCS Championships, were held at Rileys in
Coventry on 7th-8th February 2009. The Midlands Championships incorporate
4 competitions: Senior Team (1st teams), Junior Team (2nd &
3rd teams), and individual senior (1st team members) and junior
level (2nd & 3rd team members) championships. Each year a trophy
is also awarded to the player with the highest break.
Teams from Warwick, York, Cardiff, Nottingham, Southampton and Imperial
attended, all of whom have been regulars at this event, and this
year was the first time the LSE had ever competed at snooker. Although
according to BUCS regulations a new team like the LSE can only play
at Shield Level (i.e. with 2nd & 3rd teams), for some reason
the Warwick organisers decided to put us in the Senior Team championship,
facing a frankly terrifying line-up of snooker legends.
We had our own
legendary snooker wizard, Robert Li, BUCS quarter finalist last
year, of course, but given that prior to the event we had only had
one snooker tournament and one team practice session, we knew we
were going for experience purposes only. Before leaving, we foolishly
checked out Warwick's snooker web page, only to be met with a dizzyingly
impressive high
breaks board, with 90+ breaks towards the top and even their
worst 3rd team players had breaks of over 40 in competition, higher
than anything we had managed in the past few weeks even in practice.
With opponents such as Mike Walsh (England snooker team), Matt Tugby
(highest break trophy last year), Matt Bradley (9 ball champion
with a 129 high break) and James Hill (BUCS national snooker individual
champion 2006), we decided that anything other than utter humiliation
would count as a victory.
As luck would
have it, Robert and Lee drew Matt Bradley and Matt Tugby in the
first cocking round of the twatting individual championship. Lee
was about to start cutting himself with despair, but decided to
watch Robert's match against Matt Bradley first. A fantastic best
of 3 match ensued, with Robert winning the first frame, which was
decided on the final black and resulted in easily the loudest shout
of the entire weekend, thanks to the nearby LSE audience. Sadly
the volume diminished as Matt scraped both of the following close-run
frames to knock Robert out.
Lee was sufficiently
inspired by Robert's battle that he decided to postpone suicide
until after his match against Matt Tugby. Matt is arguably one of
the best university cueists in England and a jolly nice chap as
well. He's also calmer under pressure than a monk on valium, which
can be pretty unnerving to play against. Matt won the first frame
but it was a close one, which made Lee think he might actually have
a chance. That chance came in the second frame, when lee potted
a long red, gaining perfect position on the black. After sinking
that one, he then potted another 3 reds, all with subsequent blacks,
and suddenly people from other tables started coming over to watch,
with one person mentioning that the 147 was on. Lee left himself
a perfect angle to break open the pack off his next red. A Warwick
guy said "man, if this works...", at which point Lee went
back to normal and missed, and the small audience offered a collective
'meh' and walked away. Lee decided not to give away the fact that
this 32 was his highest ever break in competition (which also resulted
in his name being shown on the high breaks board for the championship),
and tried his best to look disappointed, rather than delighted,
with what he had just done. Another 18 break in the frame and some
good safety resulted in Matt needing snookers, thus giving Lee the
ridiculously unlikely accolade of taking a frame off Tugby. Chuffed
to bits, but the chuffedness was short-lived as Matt won the deciding
frame.
Alpesh and Will
both had similarly tough first round draws and got knocked out,
leaving only Dan Steene who managed to win an epic deciding frame
in his match against one of the Nottingham boys. Unfortunately for
Dan his next round match was against the eventual finalist from
Cardiff, and as Dan commented, "destroyed is not a strong enough
word for what just happened to me".
The team championship
began in the afternoon, with LSE drawing the Imperial 1st team in
their first match for an all-London affair among what was otherwise
a bunch of northern monkeys. To put things into perspective, Imperial
have been regular contenders at national university snooker events,
and in fact reached the semi-final of the BUCS National Snooker
Trophy in 2008. They also have their very own snooker room on campus
with 4 snooker tables. We, on the other hand, have no snooker tables,
no experience (apart from Robert of course) and only one practice
session under out belt. So it was several different kinds of awesome
that we ended up BEATING THEM 6-4. Oh yes. We beat
the Imperial 1st team. Their Hard Science style was no match for
our Investment Banking style.
Sadly that was
our only team victory over the weekend, with Robert being the only
outstanding player, winning 6 frames, which included breaks of 33
and 35 (Alpesh won 3 team frames, Lee 2, Dan 1 and none for Will
or Ken) but the ability to secure gloating rights in London made
the whole thing worthwhile. At the BUCS Shield in Leeds in March,
none of the teams we will face will be as strong as the Imperial
1st team, so this means we have a great chance not only of getting
past the quarter finals and being promoted to the full championship
next year, but we also have a chance at actually winning it. And
if we win the BUCS pool shield in a couple of weeks as well, I think
a strongly worded letter to Howard Davies, demanding our very own
snooker and pool room, will be in order.
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Final
results of the MUSC
- Teams Championship
- Warwick 1
- Teams Trophy
- Warwick 2 beat Cardiff 2 3v2
- Individual
Championship - Jay Murphy (Warwick)
- Individual
Trophy - David Spencer (Warwick)
- Highest Break
- Mike Walsh (York) 59
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