Humble Mark Williams 'playing better than he ever has' as he eyes latest Crucible crown at World Championship
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Updated 25/04/2022 at 09:42 GMT
Mark Williams has made a blistering start in the first two rounds of the World Snooker Championship and on current form could be well placed to take the crown at the Crucible for the fourth time. David Hendon looks at the humble Welshman's brilliant career to date and how more glory could be on the cards. Stream the 2022 World Championship on discovery+.
'What a display!' - Watch sensational 127 from Williams against Page
You can guarantee that the one person not getting carried away by Mark Williams’s ferociously brilliant display so far in the World Championship is the man himself.
Williams has destroyed his first two opponents for the loss of only six frames: Michael White 10-3 and Jackson Page 13-3 with a session to spare. On his way to the quarter-finals, the three times Crucible champion has compiled ten centuries.
By anyone’s standards, this is impressive stuff. Williams, though, will take it in his stride. Laid back, laconic and unflappable, he is the master of remaining calm and puncturing hyperbole. Unusually, he is a good loser. Or rather, he wants to win but winning isn’t everything. It doesn’t define his character and therefore his state of mind.
However, if the Welshman carries on like this then he could at 47 years of age end up the oldest Crucible champion a week from now. His next test is a last eight-meeting with the stubborn and resilient Yan Bingtao, a player 25 years his junior, who outlasted Mark Selby in an epic on Saturday night.
Williams has said more than once that he doesn’t deserve to be bracketed with Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins, but this is like George Harrison asking not to be put on the same level as Lennon and McCartney. At the end of the day, he was still a Beatle and Williams will forever be celebrated as part of snooker’s Class of ’92.
Purely on titles won, he is the junior member of this hallowed pantheon. O’Sullivan has 38 ranking titles to his name, Higgins 31 and Williams 24, but for a time around the turn of the millennium he was the senior man of the three.
The Class of ’92 turned professional shortly after the general election won that year by John Major, who stated that he wanted to create a ‘classless society'. Look around. He didn’t succeed.
Britain is still a country where your background can open doors. Working class people have traditionally had to kick them in. Indeed, for a long time on British television the only place you heard authentic regional accents was on sports coverage.
An activity such as snooker, which is relatively cheap to play, offers an outlet regardless of your supposed status and the game’s history is full of men who have achieved national celebrity from humble starts.
In Wales, snooker was always linked to the workplace. Leagues proliferated among miners and steelworkers. Like coal and rugby, it was part of the bloodstream for generations. Another valleys boy, James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, first learned the guitar by perfecting Drag Racer, the iconic BBC snooker theme.
Williams grew up in Cwm, a mining village in Ebbw Vale. He discovered snooker watching his father play in a Christmas tournament for miners. His parents bought him a six-foot table and that was that. He found something he was good at, something he could make a life from.
This was the time of the UK snooker boom. In Wales, the junior scene was thriving. Williams played at a club full of adults who refused to treat him with kid gloves. It was here that he developed the hard shell no one has penetrated since. Those older guys took great delight in beating the young upstart until he started beating them and they didn’t want to play him any more.
Representing a new wave of talent coming into the game, O’Sullivan and Higgins broke through before him as title winners. Williams captured his first trophy at the 1996 Welsh Open, a few weeks before his 21st birthday.
This was a very competitive era, with Stephen Hendry the no.1, established names like Steve Davis, Jimmy White and John Parrott still near the top, the likes of Peter Ebdon, Ken Doherty and Alan McManus winning titles and emerging names such as Stephen Lee, Matthew Stevens and Paul Hunter coming through. But gradually, Williams went past all of them.
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'Frightening' - Williams wows White with Crucible masterclass
During the 1999/2000 season he appeared in eight finals from 16 events, winning both the UK Championship and his maiden world title. He took over as world no.1 and became a regular in snooker’s winners’ enclosure. During the 2002/03 campaign he won the UK, Masters and world titles and remains only the third player after Davis and Hendry to complete this ‘triple crown’ in a single season.
In time, the consistency dropped. O’Sullivan and Higgins were among those who thrived while Williams had management issues and the titles dried up. He won his 18th ranking title in 2011 but by 2017 had dropped out of the elite top 16.
This was the year the Crucible celebrated 40 years of staging the World Championship. All of the living former champions attended a special evening to commemorate the anniversary but Williams stayed away. He had lost in qualifying and found himself in a deep funk, no longer enjoying the game and thinking of packing it in.
His wife Joanne talked him into trying to find a way out of the doldrums. “I don’t think she could put up with me being around all day long,” was how Williams put it.
His good friend and fellow player Lee Walker was a coach for SightRight, Stephen Feeney’s alignment method which had already helped several players. Looking for a fresh start, Williams gave it a go. The results came quickly and impressively.
He won his first ranking title for six and a half years at the 2017 Northern Ireland Open, captured the German Masters later that season and ended the campaign with a stunning third world title success, beating Higgins 18-16 in arguably the highest quality Crucible final ever seen.
By now, Twitter had revealed him to be a genuine man of the people. He liked a drink, a kebab and a game of bingo. He had stayed true to his roots and the public recognised him as one of their own.
Perhaps more impressive than any performance is Williams’s ability to put his results into context. Win or lose, he is still Mark, lover of life regardless of its peaks and troughs.
Reputations have never meant anything to him. When Davis dropped out of the elite top 16, Williams told him not to worry, he could get him tickets to the Masters. When he beat Hendry 9-2 in a final he said he was gutted it wasn’t 9-1.
There have been some technical tweaks this year. All through his career he has floated pots in, now he is playing shots with more firmness, aping the styles of his main rivals.
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Mark Williams of Wales plays a shot
Image credit: Getty Images
O’Sullivan is among those who has taken notice. “I think he is actually playing better now than he ever has,” the Rocket said. “He’s hitting the ball with more authority. I watched him play the other day and I just thought, he’s an animal, he’s an absolute animal the way he hits the ball. It’s great to see.”
You can’t get the better of Mark Williams off the table. The question is whether anyone can now do so on it.
In a sport which demands intense mental toughness, he doesn’t show fear. While many players suffer in the claustrophobic Crucible, he thrives, playing so far with a freedom completely counter to the seriousness of the occasion.
There’s still a week to go in Sheffield and some big hitters remain in the mix, including O’Sullivan and Higgins. But if attitude is to count for anything then Williams has an edge over all of them.
Just don’t expect him to get too excited about it.
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