A Load Of Balls?

Myself and my county pool playing colleagues headed to the National Inter-county Eightball Pool Finals in Great Yarmouth at the weekend.

For the uninitiated these finals are played at a caravan park with the 500 or so caravans providing cheap accommodation for the 500 or so pool players and officials attending the event. And, as all the Surrey teams (men’s A team, men’s B team, ladies and juniors) had qualified, we accounted for a fair percentage of the people present.

So it was a weekend away with a lot of people I’d known for more than 10 years and, although it didn’t go too well on the pool table, it was superb to be part of it and remind yourself why you bother playing team games like this in the first place.

On a selfish level I was gutted that I played badly but I was even more gutted when I saw a few of my team-mates struggle because I knew exactly how they were feeling – and it’s very hard to hide in a massive hall full of players watching everything you do.

But on the plus side there was a feeling of genuine pleasure when you saw a mate play well and raise his game to win key frames. And when we were down after losing our opening match then ecstatic after ironing out a side in our next match you just knew that everyone else felt the same as you did.

We then played the defending champions in our last match and it went all the way to 22-22 to force a sudden-death three-frame play-off. They won frame one, we won frame two and in frame three we had our best player and one of my best mates on the table – and he accidentally foul-potted the black to lose the frame and the match.

We were gutted and he was devastated but we were all in it together and in the same situation he would have been the only player we wanted to play.

Bill Shankly once said that ‘Football isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s more important that that!’ And while a few games of pool clearly isn’t as important as that it’s a basic truth that what you do makes you what you are and most of us are both pool players and more importantly friends.

And when I eventually take a break from all things baize-connected as I'm slowly starting to do I’ll greatly miss them.