It’s fair to say that yesterday at the Crucible didn’t yield the results most fans expected and, in some cases, probably probably wished. Hopefully it will not deter fans to attend the event. Personally, I find it interesting to discover how good some of the “overseas” seniors are. They are proof that snooker is played at a high level for a long time in many parts of the world, something that the UK centric organisation of the sport doesn’t promote enough.

Here are the match results on the day:

Jimmy White remains the crowd favourite but he’s 63 now but played Alfie Burden a much younger man (48) who is still competing on the main tour and Jimmy had little answers to his opponent superior consistency. Also, Alfie was certainly very motivated because he lost to Jimmy in the final of this event in 2023. It was a very painful defeat for Alfie at the time but he can now put that behind him.

Nobody knew much about Charl Jonk¹ who had never played in this environment. Charl started slowly. He needed two frames to adapt to the conditions and the atmosphere. After that he proved to be very solid and a good scorer. He made two breaks over 60 in this match.

Tony Drago v Gerard Greene proved to be the best match on the day. It was tense, it was close and both played and scored well. Tony’s passion is strong as ever and he wears his heart on his sleeve. What’s not to like?

Hassan Kerde, from Australia, was an “unknown” quantity before his first match yesterday … he made four breaks over 50 in his trashing of Tony Knowles who scored just 61 points in total during the match.

Here are the afternoon session pictures:

And here the evening session pictures. Alas it’s very obvious that players like Jimmy and Ken losing early is likely to hit the attendance negatively. A lot of fans come to watch certain players only and aren’t very keen to “discover lesser known players