World Under-21 Preview

The 2011 World Under-21 Snooker Championships get underway on Tuesday in the city of Montreal, Canada and RIBSA will have four players aiming to bring home the title. Vincent Muldoon, Jason Devaney, Greg Casey and David Cassidy will travel out on Monday with National Irish Coach PJ Nolan for the 12 day event being held in Canada for the first time.

Canada may not be everyone’s idea of a snooker stronghold but it’s had its fair share of professional players over the years including a World Champion in Cliff Thorburn and the game is still very popular in certain area’s. However Canada’s entry in the event is poor enough with only four entries out of the eight that they could have entered, proving that they have a lot to do to promote the game to the junior ranks.

This years event is sure to be a very competitive event with our youngsters up against a strong entry from China once again with last years finalist Li Hang (pictured) joined by Zhang Anda. Both are highly experienced internationals and ex-professionals and will surely be in the mix come the later stages.

The UK based players will also be in with a shout with England’s trio of Nick Jennings, Mitchell Travis and Callum Downing joined by the likes of the impressive Scott Donaldson from Scotland. Another scot that will be in with a shout will be European Under-19 finalist Michael Leslie who will be hoping to put the final defeat in Malta behind him and go one further this time.

Of the other players expected to be in the final shake up we have the likes of Northern Ireland’s Declan Brennan, Israel’s Shachar Ruberg, Kishan Hirani and Duane Jones from Wales, Qatar’s Ali Al Obadli and the ever strong Thailand contingent.

The opening ceremony will kick off the proceedings in the Sheraton Hotel on Monday night with the group stages starting Tuesday morning. PJ will be keeping everyone up to date with all the results right here and we also have the results from IBSF site embedded in our World Under-21 section main page.

We also have two ref’s in Ger Murray and Stephen Sherry officiating at the event and Stephen will be keeping us up to date with things on and off the table in his blog from the event. Montreal is a superb city and hopefully the lads will have time to take in the sights in their downtime away from the tables.

RIBSA would like to wish all four players the very best of luck and hopefully bring back the title that Rodney Goggins won all of those 12 years ago in Cairo. Below is is full list of all the previous World Under-21 Champions.

Ireland has held the championship three times with the likes of Sam Craigie, Gary Wilson, Marco Fu winning the title since it’s inception in 1987. We have also won the title twice thanks to Rodney Goggins and Ken Doherty, Ken remains the only player to have ever won all 3 World Titles in the IBSF Mens, Under-21’s and the World Professional Title. Robert Murphy came very close in 1998 losing out to Luke Simmonds in the final which was held in Malta.