Practice before Match

Mark Carrington asked me for a game of snooker this afternoon as he had a match coming up. I reluctantly agreed, I have been avoiding Snooker as I feel it interferes with my Billiards.

We played for two hours and he beat me 8-2, he did not play that well on what was a slow table. He still managed a couple of 50 breaks and a nice 78 which should have been a lot more. I picked up two frames which was OK one was very scrappy and the other I managed a 31 and a 25.

He agreed to play an extra hour of billiards at the end which suited me nicely before my match.

I started off with a little 15 break and a few little 6/7's. Mark knocked in a 27 all pot reds. The game went scrappy and both of us struggled. I played a nice drop cannon and pushed the red over the top back and left me at the top. I got a lovely 41 all really nice flowing cannons and cross losers up to the middle bag. Only a cover stopped me. Mark missed a pot and I went to the table and carried on scoring getting 39, missing a long loser. Mark potted my ball and baulked me, I hit a sweet fluky cannon and knocked a 36.

We carried on and in the hour I scored over 370 points in the hour to Marks 160. He did manage a 43 break mainly potting.

I can honestly say I have never played better flowing billiards every shot seemed really easy and in total control. It was like some sort of dream where no matter what I did everything did exactly as I wanted. Every shot was mm perfect. Just for 20 minutes I felt like Martin Gooodwill or Roy Bacon. Almost like someone had thrown a switch and made me into a good player for an hour. What a lovely feeling to finally play the game even for a brief time really well.

Mark was quite impressed he said I was playing like the old chap he had seen in Huddersfield (Tony Clegg - I had forgotten he had come to watch my game two weeks ago) he said my use of side and drag were just like Tony, well that's high praise hope I can keep it up. After that I will probably play rubbish tonight.