Ken Doherty left his BBC colleagues giggling after making a quip about Ronnie O’Sullivan’s absence from the Masters following his Championship League meltdown.
The Rocket exploded in frustration during his match with Robert Milkins last week, slamming his cue against the table after missing a simple pot. O’Sullivan continued to take out his anger on the cue after the match, which he lost 3-2, chucking it in the bin and pulling out of the competition before his final group game against Ali Carter.
It was then confirmed that O’Sullivan would not be defending his Masters crown just two days before his first-round clash against John Higgins, with Neil Robertson stepping in. The Rocket has recently teamed up with Lee Walker, well-known for working with Mark Williams, who saw his own Masters dreams dashed by Ding Junhui in a last-frame decider on Monday.
During an interval in that match, Doherty, seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry and presenter Hazel Irvine discussed Williams’ struggles and his partnership with Walker. Hendry said: “It is all about alignment with Lee.
“I don’t think here at the interval they went into the dressing room and he [Walker] would be giving him stern talkings to, because Mark wouldn’t take it and would just tell him to get out. He is a mate as much as anything in the dressing room with Mark. It is an alignment the way he coaches, so it is all about that.”
Doherty then revealed he couldn’t resist teasing Walker in the practice room, saying: “I was ribbing him in the practice room, Lee Walker. I said, ‘how’s it going with Ronnie O’Sullivan? After a month with him he has smashed up his cue and pulled out of the Masters”, leading to laughter from Hendry and Irvine.
The Rocket explained his Masters withdrawal during an appearance in the Eurosport studio on Monday night. He said: “Yeah, it was a nightmare decision to make. You know, if you’d have asked me Sunday was I ready to play, I probably would have been OK to play, but it’s such a massive tournament.
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“I’ve obviously been on this three-week trip away playing [in the Far East] and I just think I exhausted myself. [There was] a lot of pressure while I was away and I just think the build-up of all that kind of just got a bit too much really.”
On smashing up his cue, he added: “I lost the plot on Thursday, snapped my cue, so that’s unplayable. I knew that at that moment in time, the right decision was to not play.
“And it’s such a big tournament, I thought whoever was going to come in should have at least had a couple of days’ notice. It [the cue] was in the bin, one of them wheelie bins, and then my mate said, ‘look, you can’t leave that there’, so he got it out and brought it with us.”
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