WEEKLY UPDATE 25 MAY 2025

The Individual Billiards and Pairs finals were played this week at Gt Horton Conservative Club, following which, League Chairman Trevor Kershaw presented prizes to all this season's winners, who were:

League Champions - Pudsey B

Play Off Winners - Pudsey B

Knock Out Competition Winners - Bradford Deaf Centre

Highest Break - C Jarvis (Princeville D) 54

Highest Break (handicap 85 and over) - P Allan (Pudsey A) 27

Individual Billiards Winner - J Dixon

Runner Up - J Bedford

Billiards Pairs Winners - J Allan and S Ash (Pudsey)

Runners Up - D Howarth and P Allan (Pudsey)

The Individual Snooker Final between John Bedford and Chris Jarvis is still to be played, hopefully on Tuesday 3rd or 10th June but this is still to be confirmed - more information when it becomes available

All 6 players in action on Tuesday seemed to struggle with the pace of the tables at the Conservative Club, resulting in fairly lengthy matches and few breaks of note. I was on marking duty for the Individual Billiards final and most of the action seemed to come in the first and last 10 minutes. Jeremy Dixon started 50 points behind John Bedford on handicap, but aided  a bit of early good fortune he quickly closed to within about 10, after a break of 21 and another run into the teens. From then on, any break of over 10 was hard to come by, although Jeremy seemed to score slightly more than John and arrived at the 180 mark over 20 in front. It was now John's turn to make a 20 break, and aided with another double figure break he led at 191-186. Jeremy then did the rest of the scoring to record a 200 - 191 victory. Congratulations to him and commiserations to John.

Gareth Kershaw refereed the Billiards Pairs Final, between the Pudsey pairings of John Allan & Sid Ash and  Dave Howarth & Peter Allan. I am indebted to him for his report on Facebook, which was as follows:

Quick report for the pairs, when I said to uncle Stephen I’ll mark all the pairs I didn’t expect still to be marking after 10 o’clock, but I would say it was a great reason as to why we have the clocks in league games. Anyway onto the games, with Pete and Sid up first looked a decent game but straight away from the string off you could see the pace of the table would cause some issues throughout, and it did, the first 5/10 minutes was just back and forth between them until Pete found some rhythm and knocked in a 16, followed next visit by 14, so his score moved on quickly and was well ahead of Sid, who I think for about 5 visits in a row had to use the rest. Pete’s rhythm only seemed to last them 2 visits and they both struggled again with the pace of the table, and were back and forth with not many scores above 6. With Pete at about 180 and Sid around 150, Pete scored 10 and looked like he was going to win by a decent margin only for to it to completely dry up and Sid scored 28 whilst Pete scored the last 10. A crucial 28 it would be at the end of the game.

Dave and John up next, best friends for 50 years, set up for the next match with handicaps on Dave led John by 82 and with the season Dave has had I thought that gave him a great advantage, John, ever the competitor, got to work with his task and made inroads early on with a few breaks into the teens and a 27 break, to get to within 30 and looked as though he was going to take over Dave at about 300 mark but then came 20 minutes of billiards I’m sure everyone watching and playing could forget, as I’m not sure anything actually happened. After this 20 minutes Dave found a few of his shots and kept ahead of John and made the gap up to 40 again at about 360-320, John then remembered how he’d played the opening 10/15 minutes and had a couple of runs into the teens, again with a few good pots off the spot. Then came John's 30 break to leave him only needing 3, which came very shortly after the 30.

As always with the Pudsey lads, an enjoyable game played exactly how billiards should be with sportsmanship and a laugh. Gaz

Stephen Kershaw

Secretary