Recalling a ‘potty’ week at the Crucible over two decades on

TWENTY-TWO years ago on Monday past (May 1st), Dungannon’s Patrick Wallace stepped into the Crucible Theatre for the biggest match of his career against his good friend, Joe Swail.

The two Northern Irish cue-men went head-to-head in what turned out to be a bit of a disappointing World Snooker Championship quarter-final from their points of view and while the result, an 11-13 defeat, didn’t go Wallace’s way, there’s little about his one and only experience at the sport’s premier event that he would change.

In 2000, Wallace, a now eight-time Northern Ireland amateur champion, came agonisingly close to sealing a maiden appearance at the Crucible in Sheffield when he played Dominic Dale in the final round of qualifying.

At 9-8 down, the Dungannon man missed what he felt was a good chance to level the match but unfortunately for him, fate had other ideas and his opponent, who he beat in his first ever live televised match the following year at the Grand Prix, went on to claim a 10-8 victory

Dale then progressed to the quarter-finals of the main event, meeting and losing to a certain Joe Swail at the last-eight stage, which, at the time, was tough for Wallace to take. But little did he know, twelve months later he would achieve the same feat.

“The year before, I played Dominic Dale in the final qualifying round and I lost 10-8, so I was disappointed because I had got very close to 9-9 which was very disappointing,” he acknowledged.

“So, I was back home at a local tournament in Antrim when Joe was playing Dominic Dale in the quarters and I was driving down the motorway thinking ‘for flip sake, I lost that match and I could have been playing Joe in the quarters of the World Championships. wouldn’t that have been something!?’.

“I was thinking ‘that could have been me’ and 12 months later, which is absolutely incredible because I thought the chance of a lifetime had been missed but the exact same thing happened!”

For that to occur, Wallace had to come through three tough qualifying matches against Nick Walker, Simon Bedford and Joe Perry.

The win over Perry, which wasn’t without drama, sent Patrick into the World Championship proper and he got his first taste of his dreams coming true by watching the first round draw in front of the television with his family and he wasn’t overly disappointed by the result.

“I remember watching the draw in my mum and dad’s house, the whole family was there. It was something I had always dreamed of being involved in because they did it live on BBC,” Wallace explained.

“I came out against Alan McManus and I thought ‘it’s tough’ because he hadn’t lost in the first round at the Crucible ever and I think he had been going every year since 1991, so I was going to have to break that sequence.

“But at the same time it wasn’t Ronnie O’Sullivan, it wasn’t John Higgins, it wasn’t Mark Williams, it wasn’t Stephen Hendry, all of whom would have been difficult games to get your head around, playing such a high profile player.

“But I knew it was still going to be an exceptionally tough game against Alan, who’s a granite tough match player.”

Nothing could have prepared Patrick for how well his first round clash with McManus would go, however, as he thumped the three-time semi-finalist 10-2, registering a century in the process, before going on to oust Mark King 13-5 to set-up a meeting with his good pal Swail in the last-eight.

Before he had even played King, Wallace had watched and supported his buddy from Belfast during an impressive 13-12 comeback win over the defending champion that year, Mark Williams and after he too had reached the quarter-finals the enormity of what was ahead of them started to sink in.

Not only were they about to play against each other for a place in the semi-finals of the World Championships against Ronnie O’Sullivan, but there was also a massive sum of money at stake with the difference between winning and losing being £36,500!

“We were such good mates and we’d practiced a lot together but we’d never so much as played for a fiver in practice and now we were playing for £36,500 [the winner earned double that amount]!,” Wallace exclaimed.

“Trying to take that all on board is difficult and for a place in the semis against Ronnie [O’Sullivan] in the one table set-up at the Crucible, which would have ticked another box on my list of things that I’d have wanted to achieve in my snooker career, was something else.”

Prior to the match, due to media commitments and a lack of time, Wallace and Swail didn’t have the chance to chat about what lay ahead and the Dungannon man feels had they done that, the quality of snooker may have been better.

But after engineering a 6-2 lead, Wallace called in on Joe and they had a chat about things, which seems, with hindsight, to have worked more in Swail’s favour.

“We never got a chance to actually sit and talk with each other and we went out and played the first session and it wasn’t good stuff,” Patrick observed.

“We both really, really struggled I think with the fact that there was so much at stake for two such good friends. We didn’t play well so I called in to see Joe after the first session and I said ‘that was all a bit strange, wasn’t it?’. He agreed so I said ‘we just have to go out there and give it our best, try and put the friendship behind us and may the best man win because we’ll still be friends after this’.

“He said, ‘you’re absolutely right, let’s go out there and give it our all’ and I felt much, much better at the start of the second session mentally.

“I felt like I really wanted to go out there and bury him and I started the session with a few nice shots but I missed one red. I’ll never forget it, it was about a foot from the black pocket and I was about six foot away from it, straight. It was an easy enough shot and I missed it and he got in, got a few, pulled another frame back and by the mid-session interval it was 7-5.”

It was from that point on that Swail started to take control of the match and the session ended with Wallace facing an uphill task, one he couldn’t conquer as the momentum swung in the Belfast man’s favour.

“Pat was well in front but he didn’t capitalise,” Joe remembered. “He kind of let me off the hook and I got back into it, started playing a wee bit better. But it’s swings and roundabouts in these long matches, it’s all momentum swings and that’s exactly what happened.”

And for Patrick, whose route to the last eight was pretty straightforward, he was left frustrated at not being able to limit the damage by his own loss of momentum and Joe’s return to form.

“That was my first experience of things going a bit wrong and I just couldn’t recover in that session,” he added. “I started to become ineffective, I was missing a few balls, my safety wasn’t great and I ended up losing the next four frames..

“With hindsight, that was a massive blow because if I had got anything out of that session other than a 7-1 loss I would have still been in great shape going into that night.

“You hear all the guys on the TV saying when you have your bad session at the Crucible, of which I only had one in the whole tournament, they’re all about damage limitation, try to get out 5-3, at the worst 6-2 but don’t lose 7-1 or 8-0 and unfortunately I got a 7-1. That was my only losing session out of the eight sessions I played at the Crucible but unfortunately because it was such a heavy loss, it ultimately cost me the match.”

While Patrick was disappointed to taste defeat, strangely Swail was equally as downbeat having won the match, which he felt wasn’t much of a spectacle.

“It was a bit of a muted match, a bit of a damp squib because we had both played so well to get that far and then when we played each other, you’re playing your best mate on the circuit, both of our families were there, when you look back at it, it was one of those matches you wish didn’t happen,” Joe explained.

“I played Mark Williams, who was world number one and reigning champion at the time, in the last-16 and I was 8-3 and 11-7 down and I won 13-12 so for me that was my pinnacle and the euphoria I got from that was incredible.

“But in the space of a day to a day and a half to go from that hight to a low against your mate in the quarter-finals, it was a bit of a strange time and unfortunately one of us had to win.

“It was a strange one because I didn’t feel elated when I won but I have great memories from it and the best memories from that match are about our families being there. A lot of them are no longer with us – his mum and dad, my dad – all our brothers and sisters were there and we all got together that night afterwards and that’s a good memory I can take from it.”

Unfortunately for Wallace, that defeat not only cost him a hefty sum of cash, but also a place in the top 32 in the world rankings, which would have made his life much easier. And while disappointed at how his professional playing career went after that fateful day, he admits his entire World Championship experience is something he remembers with great fondness.

“Had I won that match it would have been a massive boost for me because I would have been £36,500 better off, which would have taken the pressure off with a few bills,” he laughed.

“But it would have put me in the top 32. I finished the season 34th and if I had won that match I would have been in the top 32, which would have put me in a lot of venues and leaving me with just one match to qualify for the World’s again rather than two or three.

“But it put me in a fantastic position at the start of the next season when I started provisionally 21st so all I had to do was have a half decent season and I would have been in the top 32 but I lost five first round matches, which cost me a lot of ranking points, including my first match at the World Championship qualifiers, which meant I was 36th and that was a much bigger blow than losing the match to Joe.

“But I’d much, much rather do what I did than get back five or six times and never get past the first round because 99.9% of my memories and emotions towards the whole thing are positive.

“One small regret is losing to Joe from 6-2 up, but everything else was magic and I can still picture standing behind the curtains waiting to go out.

“It was the best feeling in the world and the worst feeling in the world all at the same time, but it was absolutely magic!”

IN NEXT WEEK’S EDITION PATRICK TALKS ABOUT HIS EYECATCHING STATS, QUALIFYING DRAMA, AND HIS CRUCBILE RETURN ALMOST TWO DECADES LATER.