Snooker World Championship: Peter Ebdon's reservoir of concentration helped him, only 14 hours after his draining and controversial win over Ronnie O'Sullivan, to a 6-2 lead from the first of the four sessions in his best-of-33-frames World Championship semi-final against Shaun Murphy.
Averaging 27 seconds per shot in comparison with his painfully slow 37 for the match against O'Sullivan, Ebdon imposed himself on his 22-year-old opponent with a familiarly effective mixture of parsimonious safety and substantial scoring.
He compiled breaks of 78, 70, 52, 69 and 93 in the afternoon frames; in the entire match against O'Sullivan his highest break was 60. Suspicion that Murphy may have reached his high for now was strengthened by his failure to pot two long reds - in the sixth frame - of a type he had been burying. One let Ebdon in for 52, the other for a clinching 24.
Apart from taking the fifth frame with its only score, 77, to trail 3-2, Murphy was kept mostly in his chair.
Amid the debate that continued to rage over Ebdon's slow play in unravelling O'Sullivan's concentration and rhythm to turn quarter-final arrears of 8-2 into a 13-11 victory, one point is inescapable: the referee is the sole judge of fair and unfair play.
But if this was not excessively slow play it is difficult to imagine what is. After two sessions, Ebdon was averaging 31 seconds per shot. That this had risen by the end to 37 made his average for the final session about 45.
Some shots do require considerable study. When he was 10-6 down, with reds spread everywhere, it took him three minutes, five seconds to find the sanctuary of a position from which O'Sullivan could not score. He gave another situation two minutes' consideration.
Many straightforward shots also took him an age. On BBC TV the 1985 champion Dennis Taylor was routinely drawing the next shot on screen with his telestrator almost a minute before Ebdon put cue to ball. In the last eight frames, Ebdon asked for the cue ball to be cleaned 30 times.
Excessively slow play, with the intention of unsettling an opponent, is against the rules. Referees are empowered to warn a player that the frame may be forfeited. Colin Brinded, the match referee, issued no such warning but a sizable body of opinion believed he should have.
"On my life I didn't do it deliberately to take Ronnie off," Ebdon claimed. "One of the problems in playing Ronnie is that you don't want to get caught up in his pace, so you slow down."
