Andrew Mackenzie: Final Curtain: Last World Snooker Championship to be held away from the Crucible (1976)

Published on Friday 16 April 2010 23:03

JOHN Higgins, the defending world snooker champion and second favourite for this year's tournament, was a babe in arms on the last occasion the championship was held anywhere other than the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. Likewise this year's tournament favourite, Ronnie O'Sullivan. Neither had yet turned a year old when, in 1976, the game's best players gathered in the north of England to contest the title.

It goes without saying that the great majority of players still involved in top level competition have no recollection whatsoever of what the world championship was like before it began its long residency in Sheffield.

The 1976 event was also notable for the fact that it was the first year that the championships were sponsored by the cigarette brand Embassy, an association which only ended when the government banned tobacco companies from sponsoring sporting events, which, in the case of boon companions Embassy and snooker, came in to force in 2005.

There were TV cameras in the Middlesbrough Town Hall, which staged the top half of the draw in 1976, and in the Wythenshawe Forum, Manchester which staged the bottom half and that year's final, but it was only after the switch to the more camera-friendly Crucible the following year that the BBC began to provide the kind of extended coverage that would transform the tournament into a major television event for the best part of two decades.

In Middlesbrough, Ray "Dracula" Reardon, the dominant player of the decade, breezed through to the final with a minimum of fuss. In the bottom and tougher half of the draw, Alex Higgins, then aged 25, flew there by the seat of his pants as he beat Cliff Thorburn in the round of 16 by 15 frames to 14; John Spencer by the same margin in the quarter-finals; and then Australia's Eddie Charlton in the semi-final by 20-18.

The final in those days was decided over a punishing best of 53 frames, and it was the man who crossed the country to Manchester, the Welshman Reardon, who ran out a 27-16 winner over Belfast's most explosive sporting export. This was Reardon's fourth consecutive world title, which he surrendered the following year when the event moved to Sheffield, and a brand new era.