On the evening of April 23, Beijing time, in a third stage of the 2022 Snooker World Championship 16-in-8 at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre, Chinese player Zhao Xintong failed to perform a good turnaround, and finally lost 9-13 to 41-year-old Scottish veteran Stephen Maguire, regrettably bidding farewell to the World Championship. This is the second time that 25-year-old Zhao Xintong has played in the main world championships, one more round than when he first competed three years ago, and it is also a new record for his career. Unfortunately, there is still a certain gap between such a result and his own and the expectations of fans and his status as the seventh seed. There was no way, I had to go back to hard training to make up for the shortcomings and fight again next year.
At the 2019 World Championships, Zhao Xintong emerged from the qualifiers and entered the main tournament, encountering Mark Selby in the first round, although he played very well, once taking a 5-1 lead, but was eventually reversed by the latter, 7-10 was eliminated. Today's Zhao Xintong is no longer what he used to be, and you are one of the three major tournaments, the British Championship champion, the seventh seeded player of the World Championship, who can directly advance to the main tournament without participating in the qualification tournament. This is also the first time that Zhao Xintong has received such treatment since entering the profession, and he was able to face the weaker qualifier Jamie Clark in the first round, and easily eliminated him with a big score of 10-2, and successfully entered the second round, which is the round of 16 of this tournament.
However, when he met Maguire, who was experienced in numerous major competitions and had just eliminated former world champion Sean Murphy, Zhao Xintong completely lost his advantage in the control of the scene and rhythm, feeling that he was led by the other party everywhere and did not play his own style of billiards. The gap between the two sides in the first stage of confrontation was not large, and Zhao Xintong only fell behind 3-5. The mid-set, the 8-set set in the second stage, determined the different fates of the two sides.
At this stage, Zhao Xintong was beaten 6-2 by the veteran Maguire, and the total score came to 5 to 11, on the verge of elimination, almost powerless to return to heaven. The Scottish veteran played his snooker skills to the fullest, the main means is to disrupt the rhythm of Zhao Xintong, completely inhibiting the characteristics of Zhao Xintong's "fast gunner", not allowing him to play to the fullest, always playing awkwardly, unable to score points continuously. The game was constantly interrupted and gradually evolved to be dominated by Maguire. Neither of them could score high scores, and took turns to play a stop-and-go.
In the process, the young Zhao Xintong, who only entered the world championship for the second time, changed his mentality, there were many low-level mistakes, and his attention was not concentrated enough, especially many times when the color ball was called a red ball, the color ball did not enter the bag, leaving Maguire with too many opportunities to easily score points. And in the long platform attack, Zhao Xintong, who has always been proud of this and is good at accuracy, has a success rate that is actually inferior to his opponent who is 16 years older than himself, and he has repeatedly lost good opportunities. In the third stage of the game on the evening of the 23rd, although Zhao Xintong adjusted his mentality and tenaciously launched a Jedi counterattack, he had to accept the result of defeat because he had fallen behind too much before.
Judging from Zhao Xintong's two games at this World Championship, when he played smoothly, the opponent did not have the strength to fight back, the process was smooth, pointing to where to play, invincible at will, against Clark, Zhao Xintong's average shooting time was less than 20 seconds, it was indeed his style and level, quite his "mentor" O'Sullivan's style. But when he met Maguire, who was stronger, more able to play big games and more experienced, Zhao Xintong's style of play would be suppressed, and he even fell into a long test of more than 1 minute many times in the game, and finally failed to play his satisfactory result after getting started. In this way, Zhao Xintong's shortcomings are still quite obvious, he holds high the banner of "attack first", high accuracy, can attack and never defend, strong ornamentation, the game process is fast, concise, deeply loved by fans, people are also quiet, known as "Zhao Gongzi". But at the same time, Zhao Xintong's effect of doing anglobal is slightly worse, there is still a lot of room for improvement in defensive skills, the position is not fine enough, the attack is strong and the defense is extremely obvious, the single high score is very small, and the number of times it can exceed one hundred is even less. These are all Zhao Xintong's shortcomings.
But no matter what, Zhao Xintong reached the round of 16 in the second time he participated in the World Championships, and the first time he was just a round of travel, this is a progress, 25-year-old young people still have a lot of opportunities, after all, the Snooker World Championships are not like the quadrennial Olympic Games, Zhao Xintong has the opportunity to come to the Crucible Theater every year. O'Sullivan once said that when he retired, Zhao Xintong was the successor, as long as he played about 80% of the potential, he had a chance to win 5 to 6 world championships, "I can't coach him anymore, he is better than me, I have to learn from him." Maybe the words "Rockets" are a bit of an overstatement, but they are not false words, and the players who can be favored by the best snooker masters in the world will never be bad. Perhaps with the continuous growth of age and age, Zhao Xintong will find and exercise better skills and style of play, less aggressive, more delicate, flexible and steady, he still has a chance to become China's first world champion.
Text/Beiqing Sports Liu Ailin