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Ssb - cope on the march
John Higgins beat Jamie Cope in the final of the Hainan Classic last season, which opened the door for the World Open in Haikou.
Higgins was on a roll 11 months ago when he won the title but is yet to regain that focus. We keep saying it could come this week but it's yet to really happen.
Cope has been AWOL for a while, not helped by a condition that has tremors when he plays. It would be nice to see him restore some confidence and obviously a win over the world champion would go a long way towards doing that.
Conditions don't seem great at the World Open. Nothing can be done about the humidity but the table on which Neil Robertson played Stephen Hendry did not inspire confidence. It didn't seem level, probably the fault of the creaky floor. This didn't help the standard.
Judd Trump's match with Mark Allen should be entertaining as these two players are both great to watch when they hit their strides - as we saw in their wonderful UK Championship final earlier this season.
Allen is in the headlines again for his crass Twitter comments yesterday about, well, pretty much everything.
Allen - as he is constantly reminding everyone - has the right to hold whatever opinion he likes but his comments always seem to be tinged with an air of nastiness.
I don't think he is really like this but he is clearly frustrated by the life of a professional snooker player. However, it isn't snooker's - or China's - fault if he is unhappy.
It's entirely Allen's right if he wants to spend all his time holed up in his hotel room watching 24 on DVD but he won't discover what China has to offer unless he steps outside.
And the blunt truth is this: nobody is forcing him to play snooker. There would be plenty of others willing to take his place if he packed it in.
One thing I will credit him with: he's one of the few players getting snooker in the newspapers. Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman, was unsurprisingly unimpressed, though, as he told today's Daily Mirror.
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Higgins was on a roll 11 months ago when he won the title but is yet to regain that focus. We keep saying it could come this week but it's yet to really happen.
Cope has been AWOL for a while, not helped by a condition that has tremors when he plays. It would be nice to see him restore some confidence and obviously a win over the world champion would go a long way towards doing that.
Conditions don't seem great at the World Open. Nothing can be done about the humidity but the table on which Neil Robertson played Stephen Hendry did not inspire confidence. It didn't seem level, probably the fault of the creaky floor. This didn't help the standard.
Judd Trump's match with Mark Allen should be entertaining as these two players are both great to watch when they hit their strides - as we saw in their wonderful UK Championship final earlier this season.
Allen is in the headlines again for his crass Twitter comments yesterday about, well, pretty much everything.
Allen - as he is constantly reminding everyone - has the right to hold whatever opinion he likes but his comments always seem to be tinged with an air of nastiness.
I don't think he is really like this but he is clearly frustrated by the life of a professional snooker player. However, it isn't snooker's - or China's - fault if he is unhappy.
It's entirely Allen's right if he wants to spend all his time holed up in his hotel room watching 24 on DVD but he won't discover what China has to offer unless he steps outside.
And the blunt truth is this: nobody is forcing him to play snooker. There would be plenty of others willing to take his place if he packed it in.
One thing I will credit him with: he's one of the few players getting snooker in the newspapers. Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman, was unsurprisingly unimpressed, though, as he told today's Daily Mirror.
More...