“Belgian snooker player Luca Brecel wins the World Championship with historic comeback”

“Snooker is exploding in Europe right now. I wanted to do it for Belgium and Europe and I can’t wait to see what it brings. I’m happy I did it,” said Brecel. In euphoria, he said that no one would see him at the table with a green skirt anytime soon. “I won’t be training for a few weeks or even months now. No training, just partying,” added the native of the province of Limburg, who received a check for 500,000 pounds (13.4 million crowns) alongside the trophy for his life’s success.

Twenty-eight-year-old Brecel did not win a single match in his previous five starts at the Crucible Theater, but this year he was the undisputed star of the tournament. In the second round, he defeated the three-time world champion Mark Williams from Wales and in the quarter-finals he sensationally defeated the seven-time champion Ronnie O’Sullivan. At the same time, Brecel was losing 6:10 against the English defending champion and world number one, but won the last seven frames and won 13:10.

Brecel made an even bigger comeback in the semi-finals. He lost 5:14 to the Chinese S’jia-chue, but after the biggest turnaround in the history of the championships, he won 17:15.

In the final, which was played for 18 winning frames on Sunday and Monday, on the other hand, Selby had to catch up. At the climax of the tournament, the thirty-nine-year-old former champion was already losing 10:16, but he returned to the game with five frames won in a row. “He’s a huge fighter, the worst you can have in the final. At 16:15, I didn’t really believe in victory,” admitted Brecel, who then sealed the triumph with two winning frames.

Selby claimed his second defeat in his sixth final. However, he went down in history as the first player to score a maximum of 147 points in the final, which he managed in the sixteenth frame on Sunday.

Snooker is traditionally dominated by players from Great Britain and Ireland, whose supremacy at the World Championship played since 1927 has only been broken by Canadian Cliff Thorburn (1980) and Australians Horace Lindrum (1952) and Neil Robertson (2010).