Zhao Xintong beat Luca Braiser 10:5, winning the British Championship is an honor for him personally, but in a broader dimension, it also implies the changing trend of the new and old iterations of snooker. In this regard, Ronnie O'Sullivan predicted in an interview with Eurosport that "more young people will emerge in the future".
文/Clive Everton，《Snooker Scene》
About thirty years ago, snooker was gradually introduced to China. In the past three decades, China has rapidly formed a coaching team, created a competition structure, and formed an assembly line-like organizational arrangement for the training of young athletes. The emergence of a large number of outstanding young players has forced the domestic competitive level to be improved through more fierce competition.
Although the development of the snooker movement in Britain appeared to be more chaotic, the British maintained its absolute dominance over the field of snooker. In recent years, the training of British domestic snooker athletes has also improved to a certain extent.
Zhao Xintong, who has twice finished runner-up at the World Amateur Snooker Championship, has long been regarded as a promising future star. Zhao Xintong's excellence in offensive technique and continuous scoring ability are very different from his performance in the competition. But even so, as a 14-year-old wild card player, his victory over two snooker masters, Ken Dahadi and Steve Davis, at the Shanghai Masters is still a feat. But during his six-year career on the Pro Tour, his ability to excel was not reflected in the results, and he was even relegated three years ago, relying only on that year's Q School to regain professional qualifications.
In fact, this season, Zhao Xintong's performance before the British Championship is also very average. Zhao Xintong, who came to York to participate in the British Championships, met Thailand's Tachaia Unau in the second round. Unfortunately, the match between the two of them was arranged in an auxiliary venue, and few people saw the wonderful confrontation between the two players who were the most fluent in attack on the tour in the second round of the British Championship. Zhao Xintong won the game by a 43-pointer in the decider.
Similarly, Zhao Xintong's courage and courage to dare to fight made him rise up to reverse the promotion after two sets behind Higgins. The British Championships also made Zhao Xintong the fourth snooker ranking champion Chinese mainland after Ding Junhui, Liang Wenbo and Yan Bingtao.
Luca Bressell, now 26, won the European U21 championship at the age of 14 and the European Amateur Championship at the age of 15. In July and 1 month, he also became the youngest regular player at the Snooker World Championships. After winning the 2017 Mid-Year Championships, his world rankings rushed to 11th place in the world.
However, the self-satisfied Bressell suffered an unexpected blow, and he lost the club he relied on for a living, which led to his stagnant performance in recent years. In addition, the shoulder injury also put him in a difficult situation, and the techniques and tactics experimented in practice did not play their due role in the game. Prior to the British Championships, Bressell's best result this season was the quarter-finals of the British Open, and his world ranking fell to around forty. Despite his good play, the unfavorable signing made Bressell's path to the final particularly difficult.
Bressel and Zhao Xintong not only performed well at the table, but they were also fluent in interviews and testimonials in non-native English outside the game, which reflected their professionalism.
The vigorous development of any professional sport is inseparable from the influx of young people, and the endless emergence of young players like Bressel and Zhao Xintong, who can pick out snooker veterans, is a very good phenomenon.