Great pals, Eurosport colleagues and two snooker legends, Jimmy White and Ronnie O’Sullivan met at the Northern Ireland Open where O’Sullivan came out on top 4-1
The most anticipated match of the day was between Londoners and two of snooker’s most popular players, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Jimmy White. Both of these players are good friends and regularly play each other in exhibitions around the world.
The match tonight between these two legends of the game could possibly be the last time they meet in a competitive match with Jimmy dropping into the danger zone of the rankings. Jimmy White currently stands at 108 in the world.
Jimmy white is a six time World Champion finalist, Masters and UK champion who at 54 still competes on the pro circuit. Unfortunately over the past number of years he has dropped in the rankings as his form diminished with age. Playing in the centre arena against players such as O’Sullivan is a rareity for Jimmy these days so tonight’s match was especially important for the whirlwind.
Ronnie O’Sullivan has had a mixed bag of form this season so far. His season opened up poorly but he has begun to pull out good wins in recent weeks. Only last week O’Sullivan reached the final of the Champion of Champions where he lost out to John Higgins who is playing the best snooker at the moment.
The snooker match tonight between these great players was not as high a standard as we would expect from great champions. O’Sullivan did have spells of his genius, particularly in the second frame where he made a total clearance of 141.
From there on and throughout the match, both players struggled, knocking in 20’s and 30 breaks at best except in the final frame where O’Sullivan cleared with a 93. It was Jimmy White who made the most amount of mistakes which ultimately cost him the match. The final score was 4-1 to Ronnie but it was closer than the scoreline suggests as Jimmy had multiple chances in the match.
O’Sullivan now goes on to play Zhang Anda in the last 32 of this new snooker event tomorrow.
