World Snooker Championships shock

Forget reigning champion Graeme Dott crashing out in the first round, unknown potter David Gilbert provided the biggest surprise of the 2007 tournament.

The World Snooker Championships are held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England every April/ May and each year produces its fair share of surprises. In 2006, for example, unfancied outsider Graeme Dott walked away with the title, but in 2007 he crashed out in the first round.

The biggest surprise for me, however, in the first round of the 2007 tournament was seeing who was lining up against seven times winner Steve Hendry. According to blurb in the press, David Gilbert was the world’s 86th ranked player, he comes from Tamworth in Staffordshire and he helps out on his father’s potato farm to supplement his income from playing snooker. Not especially exciting, huh?

Well, for me it was, as I grew up in the same village (Donisthorpe, Leicestershire) as the very same David Gilbert, and he was a friend of my brother. In fact, I remember him coming round to our house as a kid, and playing on our cheap and nasty miniature snooker table. Strangely enough, he usually won.

What is striking about this is that even from an early age – we’re talking nine or ten years old here – David was determined that he was going to be a professional snooker player. I never quite believed him, and had assumed that the fad would pass. I left the village at the age of eleven, never heard of him again, and assumed that he would have become and accountant or something.

To see him on TV taking on Stephen Hendry at the Crucible in snooker’s biggest tournament, therefore, came as something as a shock. He really had made it after all – which shows that dedication really can pay off when you want to make it to one of the world's biggest sporting events.

And, as I’m sure I must have beaten him once on that creaking table with tiny balls and a rumpled baize, does that mean I’m one of the world’s top 100 snooker players?