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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

You know how recently I went on about the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean, not least because of how well the Irish team did in tieing with Zimbabwe for openers and then defeating two test nations in Pakistan and Bangladesh?

Well because you pay close attention you’ll know that Cricket is not even a minority sport in Ireland; it simply isn’t that popular.

Snooker on the other hand, is a minority sport in Ireland. If it is a sport to begin with that is.

The tail end of the Cricket World Cup overlapped with the beginning of the Snooker World Championship, and I decided to spare you the long week of the end of the cricket and all of Snooker’s greatest competition.

That means I spared you Ireland getting annihilated in their final Super-8 cricket game which was against Sri Lanka, and also reporting that Sri Lanka were then duly defeated in the final by the favourites and ever impressive Australia.

What you’ve missed in the last week is Ireland’s top snooker player, Ken Doherty, not making it very far in the World Championship at the Crucible, and the other Irish players also getting knocked out in the first couple of rounds.

For the record you also missed an astonishing comeback in the quarter-final by World Champion of a couple of years ago, Shaun Murphy - who is clearly an Englishman because Irish people don’t spell ‘Shaun’ like that, and Americans don’t play snooker.

Anyway Murphy lost his semi-final, and over yesterday and today the final has been taking place. It’s an absolute epic of safety play with some impressive potting and it’s going late. As I write this it is midnight in England with Scotland’s John Higgins 14-13 ahead of England’s Mark Selby, but yesterday Higgins had a lead of 12-4.

So an amazing comeback for a final then that only Jimmy White has ever managed the like of before, but then that time the Whirlwind went and lost almost as if showing off.

Twenty years ago this weekend gone I travelled to Norwich in England to watch Everton win the English Football League. Apart from Everton being from the city of Liverpool which had a strong Irish element with its famine leftovers - if that’s not an oxymoron - the relatively recent spell of emigration of Irish people to England in the 1950s left Everton with a not insignificant Irish following helped also by several Irish internationals playing for the Blues.

When snooker peaked in television terms with over half of Britain’s adult population watching (and much the same in Ireland), Irishman Dennis Taylor beat England’s all-time great Steve Davis 18-17 on the final black ball in the final frame of those thirty-five frames. That was just two years before Everton were at Norwich winning that second title in three years - with a Van den Hauwe goal after 45 seconds I recall.

So after leaving The Canaries’ Carrow Road it made perfect sense on the return to Merseyside to call into the city of Sheffield and attempt to gain entrance into the Crucible and the ongoing World Snooker Championships.

What am I trying to say? That as well as great games and sporting events, the English make great beers.

Update: Higgins 15 Selby 13 First one to eighteen gets crowned. Selby was only a qualifier, so I’m cheering for him to win five frames before Higgins wins three.

Result: Higgins 18 Selby 13

See Also:
   • Being Irish and Missing England
   • Irish Home Rule causes 50 years of British misery
   • Little Judy’s trying to watch “Top of the Pops”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 5:36 pm and is filed under 1-eolai, England, Sport. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.