SNOOKER: The 2006 World Championship was widely viewed as the most open for years but few, surely, could have imagined Graeme Dott holding the trophy aloft at the end of the Crucible's annual 17-day marathon.
The 28-year-old Scot's 18-14 victory over Peter Ebdon, the 2002 champion, was sealed at 1am, 50 minutes beyond the previous latest finish to a Crucible final in 1985, when Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis 18-17 on the final black of a 69-minute deciding frame.
Another record, the longest frame, was set in the 27th, a 74-minute epic that Ebdon, who had started the final session 15-7 down, took on the black to close to 15-12.
Context is all. A slow, relatively unimportant frame can be a cure for insomnia.
But this one, with its safety exchanges, occasional scoring and lengthy considerations of difficult positions was engrossing because of Dott's desperation to end a losing streak that was threatening, through Ebdon's unrelenting will, to deny him the fulfilment of every player's fantasy, winning the world title.
"Every shot a pint of blood," was the phrase Cliff Thorburn, the master grinder of the 1980s, used about the kind of frame in which he revelled.
Terry Griffiths, another former world champion, has said, "The worst time is when you've almost won. You know mathematically that you can still lose but if you're a long way in front and not far to go to the winning post, it's very difficult not to let your mind run on ahead."
With an eight-frame lead and Ebdon needing to beat him 11-2 in the last session, Dott would have been inhuman not to have had visions of glory. So the slow erosion of his advantage tested his nerve and resolve to the utmost.
Ebdon, who had laboured to such limited effect in the first three sessions, came out for the fourth as if his tanks of emotional energy had been fully replenished. His 117 accounted for the opening frame and as he added the following three, some observers began to think the unthinkable.
The loss of the 74-minute frame, after so prodigious an investment of emotion and effort, appeared devastating for Dott.
"It's unbelievably hard to stay positive," he said of the protracted process through which Ebdon inexorably closed the gap.
"It was so tough out there. I just kept twitching. I knew I was playing too slowly and too negatively, so I decided to change something. I washed my face. I sped up my play. I was doing anything to give myself a chance."
Dott managed to end his six-frame losing streak but Ebdon not only won the next but seemed certain to narrow the gap to one until his touch deserted him within a few pots of winning the following frame. As gritty as Dott has long been known to be, he surpassed himself by clearing up with 66, his highest break of the match, to go three up with four to play. It was, he said, "the best clearance of my life".
After his four hours of anguish, Dott's pivotal clearance imbued him with the predatory steeliness with which he added the two frames he needed to secure a trophy which, loyal Rangers supporter that he is, he hopes to display at Ibrox when it stages the last match of the season, against Hearts, on Sunday.
