Mark Allen and Wu Yize played out the longest, “worst” and “most bizarre” frame in Crucible history during their World Snooker Championship semi-final on Friday.
The extraordinary battle lasted one hour and 40 minutes, surpassing the 85-minute frame between Mark Selby and Yan Bingtao during the 2022 World Championship.
Allen had roared back into contention after trailing 6-2 to the talented 22-year-old Wu, winning five frames in succession to lead 7-2 and scoring the highest break at the Crucible this year of 145 en route.
But the next frame turned to farce when the black blocked the right corner pocket. With Allen leading 39-13 and the eight remaining reds all clustered near the right corner, Wu and Allen took it in turns to tap reds closer and closer to the black hanging over the pocket.
The result was a logjam, with the reds and the black all crammed against each other. It sent the Crucible crowd into a state of delirium, with spectators cheering every shot to the rafters as referee Marcel Eckardt desperately tried to keep control of the room.
“I’ve never seen a frame like it in all my years, I’ve never seen it like this, never this bad,” said John Parrott, speaking on BBC Sport. “These reds are just glued to each other now … Come on ref, you’ve got to do something here. You’ve got to step in. This is just silly.”
He added: “This is the most bizarre frame I’ve ever seen here at the Crucible Theatre.”
Stephen Hendry was equally unimpressed with how Eckardt handled the situation. “The referee needs to call this, I’m afraid. In my opinion he should have called it a while ago … This is the dark side of snooker.”
Finally, after an interjection from fellow referee and tournament director Rob Spencer, Eckardt called the players together to warn them he would call a re-rack unless they resolved the stalemate in their next three shots.
“We were hoping the black was going to drop,” the referee explained to an exasperated Allen, who had no choice but to pot the black in order to keep the frame alive and protect his lead. It ended 56 minutes of snooker since the last pot.
Wu took several visits – comically fouling by potting the black in the very pocket that had caused all the fuss – but eventually got over the line to win what Hendry called “the most ludicrous frame of snooker in Crucible history”, and drawing the semi-final level at 7-7.
Afterwards Steve Davis was damning, calling the episode “an embarrassment to snooker – it must never happen again.”
