Playing pool and looking back at days of snooker

The Royal Oak pool player - winners of the 2019 GibOil Plate. A great team with which I was privileged to play.

Let's celebrate the victory first and foremost. And what a match it was: 5 - 4 to the Royal Oak who battled it out in the final against the Hackney Carriage. Reaching the final of this annual Gibraltar pool competition is an achievement in itself; it is the result of several months of regular matches against some pretty good teams.

Gibraltar's is a small community and the pool family just a tiny part of that small community. We all tend to know each other and at some point in the year we are likely to play each other. We can get to know each other's games quite well. This in itself poses quite a challenge, especially in your individual competitions - you can get complacent, or, on the contrary, you can feel a bit intimidated if you're up against a player that you feel is more skilled than you are.

The Gibraltar Seniors team at the EBA World Cup at Bridlington, 2018

But when you are part of a team, that all changes. In the team setting you can build on each other's strengths and you can help to shore up each other's weaker areas. There are, of course, challenges in playing as part of a team. There are issues of bonding, responding positively to each other, feeling supportive and sometimes feeling letting down by someone not playing to their full strength or not taking the competition seriously.

Yet it is in a team that sometimes the best can emerge from each player. It only takes one player in a team to exhibit self-belief for the team to start to play more strongly. Self-belief is powerfully contagious, and it is self-belief that brings the strongest game out of each player. A team that plays to its convictions that it is strong, is much harder to beat than a team that lacks a unity of conviction.

I can't say I gave the Royal Oak my best efforts this year - as I've said in a previous post, it's been a year of poor health for me, and that has had its effects on my own self-belief. And I was delighted and humbled to have been asked to play in the final. I played my part and won my frames, and, despite a strong challenge from Hackney Carriage players, it was my team mates from Royal Oak that raised the GibOil Plate at the end of the competition.

Of course, the challenges continue to come and competitions are constantly on the horizon - not least the EBA European Pool Cup 2019 that is to take place in May in Bridlington, and I'm finally beginning to look forward to playing there.

Having to work hard against Jotham Olivero in the Singles competition

I have to mention having failed to reach the quarter finals when I lost in the GPA Singles tournament to Jotham Olivero earlier in the week. Jotham is a good player and would have been hard to beat even if I had been on top form, which I was not,with still some way to go. As it is, he played some super shots and beat me 3 - 1. I'll have my own back some time, Jotham!

And now for the looking back at snooker - my first love in cue sports. Here is a photo an old friend of mine sent me recently. We were snooker-playing buddies in the 80s, when we were still teenagers, and we were good. Dean was a brilliant player in those days, far better than I, and went on to win the Kent Championship. We played the Medway and District circuit and in this photo we were just getting ready to play the final of the Medway and District Championship. A hard game, snooker, with differences in the way you handle the potting and the overall game plan. But we loved playing, and we had that remarkable energy, stamina and fearlessness of youth that carries you through everything.

That's me, third from the right!

Having said that, as the article says, we lost that competition. So why am I so proud of the photo? Because it brings back some great memories, reminds me that I was really good at these cue sports once, and that it is those experiences that fortify me during competitions now. Thanks for the memories, Dean!