Fourth U.K. snooker title for Davis

Press, 2 December 1987, Page 37

Fourth U.K. snooker title for Davis

NZPA-AFP Preston, England World snooker champion Steve Davis collected his fourth successive United Kingdom title yesterday after one of the game’s best ever finals.

He beat fellow-Englishman Jimmy White, 16-14 in a titanic struggle between the world’s top two players to claim his sixth U.K. open title and a £70,000 ($198,000) first prize.

“For excitement you’ll probably never beat my 1985 world championship final against Dennis Taylor," recalled the world number one when beaten 18-17 on the final black of the final frame.

“But for technical quality, with both players at the peak of their game, I don’t think there has ever been a better match. I certainty haven’t been involved in one.

“It seemed like one mistake and the frame was over.

The safety play was superb. “It was an amazing standard.” Davis made five century breaks in the final, with three of them coming significantly in the final session. He revelled in the pressure, following a break of 108 with a match-clinching clearance of 42 and delivering the final blow with a brilliant cut on the pink. The world’s best player now has a remarkable record of 40 wins in 43 matches over

a nine-year period and an unbeaten sequence stretching back four years here. Only once in 12 meetings has White beaten Davis in a final, in the 1981 Northern Ireland Classic, hardly a major event White will look back at a miss on the green in the eighteenth frame and a straightforward black that rattled In the jaws of the pocket in the twenty-fifth as the mistakes which prevented

him breaking Davis’s six-year hold over him. “It was a good scrap, but I never punished Steve. If 'The Nugget’ is not potting too well, he can always revert to safety to win frames,” said White. White received £42,000 ($119,000) for finishing runner-up and topped that up with £7OOO ($19,800) for the highest televised break prize with a dazzling total clearance of 139 in the fourth frame.