Zhao Xintong knocked in a maximum 147 break at the Q Tour snooker event on Söder on Saturday, but Irishman Brian O’Grady showed he could hold his own in Friday’s qualifiers by winning his first match before missing out on the last 64.
With only around 120 pros on the World Professional Billiards & Snooker (WPBSA) Tour at any one time, the Q Tour represents a chance for those seeking to make it in the pro game, as well as giving top amateurs like Brian a taste of the big time against some very tough competition.
Zhao, a UK Championship winner in 2021, has been out of the game following a suspension related to a match-fixing probe, and he is competing in Stockholm as he seeks a chance to make his way back into the pro ranks, where the likes of Ronnie O’Sullivan have tipped him for greatness.
For Brian, who is currently ranked 13th in Sweden, it’s a chance to see up close what the very best have to offer – and to measure himself against them.
“if you’re a climber, you want to have a tough mountain – otherwise, what’s the point?” the Tipperary native told Irish In Sweden outside the Snookerhallen club on Söder on Saturday.
With his children grown up, Brian rediscovered his passion for the chalk, the balls and the green baize when he found his old snooker cue in the basement storage room, and his desire to get better meant it quickly became a time-consuming hobby.
“I’m from Thurles, and there’s a golf club there with a with a snooker table – I’ve been hunted off that table by adults since I was seven or eight years old. I fell in love with it as a child, when I could barely peek over the top of the table, and it just fascinated me.
“And I tell you, every time I walk into a place where there’s a table in front of me that I can play on, I look over my shoulder to see is there any adults about to chase me off – at 54 years old, it’s in my bone marrow. I cannot get rid of that, and the thrill of suddenly realising I can get to play now for the next hour or two, I actually have never shaken that feeling,” he says.
Having taken up the game again, Brian realised that he didn’t just want to while away an hour or two – he wanted to be the best player he could be.
“I’ve improved myself a lot in the last couple of years, and you actually recognise the different sort of steps you move through as you get better,” he explains.
“In snooker, the first step is just potting the ball – then you move to the point where potting the ball is a given, and it’s making the next pot an easy pot, and then you move to the next stage, which is where it’s precise, exactly where you’re going to be two, three shots from now.
“There’s a few problematic balls over there, clumped together against the cushion? You’re already thinking about where you need to be to get them off the off the cushion. Then you kind of have a whole dimension of safety play, where you try to see, ‘where can I put the white ball to make it the most difficult for him that he might give me a chance?’. And remember, all the people here are really good at safety play, so it’s safety play on steroids.”
Decked out in the full waistcoat-and-dickie bow regalia required by the rules, Brian cuts a serious figure at the table, but off it his twinkling smile is never too far away.
That said, there’s a competitive fire that obviously burns within him and that led him to try to live with some of the best players in the world, never mind Sweden, at this week’s Q Tour tournament.
“There are only about 124 snooker players in the world who are professional and every year, about 30 or 40 drop off, and 30 or 40 new ones get their new cards to replace them,” Brian explains.
“One of the methods is this thing called the Q tour, which is seven events that they have every year. Most of them are in England, but they are now trying to spread it around a little bit more European wise. So there’s one in Bulgaria, there’s one here in Stockholm, I think one also in either Austria or Germany. And the winner of the points from these seven events gets a professional card, and I think the all the winners of any individual event go through to a playoff to fight for, I think, another three or four cards.”
Like all professional sports, the chances of getting to the very top are slim, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, or that there’s no value in taking on the best in the world.
“I am nowhere near the standard of the people who are going to win this today, but since it’s local and anybody can join, I put my name in the hat just for the experience of it. I’d be here anyway, watching it, so I may as well try and qualify,” Brian says bluntly.
“Yesterday was the qualification during the weekend. It’s the last 64, 32 of the spots are already earmarked for the top players, but the other 32 spots were fought for yesterday – I played my first round, I won, and my second round I lost to a very good player called Mark Vincent.”
Despite that defeat, Brian remains very upbeat.
“It’s been amazing to take part in it- getting beaten by somebody really, really, much better than you is actually nearly an education in itself, because you see the centimeter precision, the perfection of how they move the white ball around. It’s quite inspiring – scary and inspiring, you realise what level you need to be at.
“I was really, really happy with how I played yesterday, in my first match, I won, playing very, very good snooker, probably the best in my life, and I tried my best against this guy Mark yesterday, got in there a little bit – in the third frame, I think I was actually leading for about five minutes, I wanted to FaceTime with my mother, go live on YouTube – ‘I’m leading!’. I think I was like 16-9 up for about four minutes before he knocked in a 59 break and knocked me out of the whole thing, but it was, it’s a real joy to see that kind of level of play up close.”
The Q Tour may be over for Brian, but his season is far from done – the Irishman who plays under the Swedish flag wants to continue his climb up the rankings in his adopted country, and the steely determination behind the friendly smile suggests he might well succeed in that ambition.
“My goal is to get into the top 10 and maybe the top eight, because then I’m eligible to represent Sweden – I’m a Swedish citizen, so I would then possibly represent Sweden, not only in the Nordic championships, where we challenge the Icelandic, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish, but also I would then be in the top five players who can go through to the European Championships.”
Whatever the outcome, Brian is just glad to have rediscovered the game that gives him so much.
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“I love the absolute joy I get out of it – I’ll give you a little quick example. Yesterday, I ended up with a very straight brown ball into the corner pocket yesterday, and the only way I was going to get onto a red, which was over near the black, was to do not a trick shot, but there’s a skill that you can do in snooker where I actually do a screw, but I screw down on the bottom right,” he says, relishing the memory.
“It makes the pot much more difficult, but when it screws back and hits the cushion, it kicks up at an angle towards the reds – it made my shot three times more difficult, but I knew in front of this guy (Mark Vincent), I had to do it. If I did a normal screw back, I’d look like a fool. I’d look like an amateur, which, of course, I am, but I’d look like a coward, because we all knew what the real shot was that the real good player would play.
“I just said, ‘feck it. I have to do it. I have to do it good’. It’s better to fail trying the really good shot than to just to be a coward and just play the normal mellanmjölk shot. So I went for it and I pulled it back, and it kicked right up and left me a beautiful shot on the next red,” he says.
“I just wanted to walk away with my hands up in the air and say, I’m done. I’m done. I’m
going home now.”
Brian may be done with the Q Tour for this year, but he’s not done with snooker yet – not by a long shot.
Photo credit – Ryan Watterson/WPBSA