The Debate: What are the greatest Triple Crown matches ever?

Back in April, Andy Goldstein, Jimmy White and Neal Foulds sat down (over Zoom) to examine the greatest Triple Crown matches in history in one of the first episodes of The Break podcast.

Post-lockdown, The Break will be returning for the 2020 World Championship with new episodes hosted by Rachel Casey and featuring a cast of Eurosport experts.

The first episode will be live on Wednesday evening, following the draw for the first round at the Crucible.

This article was first published in April.

You can listen to episode 1 in full using the link above, but below we have pulled out some the best areas of discussion as the team went about the difficult process of trying to narrow down some of the best snooker matches in history...

Neal Foulds: It’s not easy is it. You play someone like Steve Davis and he hammers you (in the 1982 final) and it can leave a scar. Especially when there’s an argument that Steve was a better player in ‘83 than he was previously. So, that was a great performance. We talk about the ‘85 World final where Dennis Taylor was 8-0 down; Alex was 7-0 down in this match and looks at that point that he’s going to get a hiding. One thing about Steve Davis, he wasn’t the sort of guy to take his foot off the brake and say "Ok, I’m so far in front I’m going to win anyway”. He would have wanted to win every frame in that match. But Alex Higgins was inspired and that was a word that I think would describe his whole career: inspired. The crowd got behind him, things changed, and what becomes a game of playing on the table becomes something in the mind and he got to Davis. At the time, very few people had ever done that before.

Jimmy White: Higgins was an incredible shotmaker but just reiterating what Neal said he was 7-0 down to Davis. It looked like it was going to be a good hiding again, the previous time he beat him 16-6 as Neal said. But when he was 7-0 down, Davis had played okay, but Higgins had made a lot of mistakes. I remember, I was there watching it. Then he went in the second session, he stole a few games on the colours, safety play-wise, which Davis is a master at, like Mark Selby is today. He’d win most games that were scrappy, and Higgins won quite a few of the scrappy frames in the second session and it knocked Davis off his normal game. He was always in the same sort of focus, he never looked flustered Davis. But for some reason he did, he got wound up, he lost his stride and Higgins went on to crawl over the line. An amazing victory over Davis, who was the best in the world at the time.

Foulds: It’s hard to talk about Paul Hunter without getting a bit emotional because who knows how far he could have gone with his game. He won three Masters and he won them all from behind. He was one of these guys who wasn’t a very good frontrunner strangely. I looked at all those Masters wins and almost every match went to the last frame. Even an easy win would be a 6-3 or 6-4 to get him to the final. Against Ronnie he was 7-2 down; who beats Ronnie from 7-2 down? Especially at the conference centre. But you can also look at other stats in that match, there’s a very revealing one there. Paul Hunter made five centuries in that final, Ronnie didn’t make any. So that tells you this guy was not somebody from yesteryear. People speak about how much the game has moved on. Paul Hunter was a great player, a great scorer and who knows if he’d have been world champion, I think he’d would have been had he still been alive now.

White:The thing I remember about that final is that they both had headbands on! It was all about Paul Hunter being the new David Beckham of snooker. As you said in his previous two matches, he was well behind in those two matches and for him to win a third one 10-9 from being 7-2 behind with Ronnie O'Sullivan was an unbelievable feat. As Neal said, we do really miss Paul Hunter and who knows how many tournaments he would have won.

Foulds:I think he was a really interesting player because if you look back at his cue action, I’ve never seen anyone cue further away from the cue ball before they hit it. Cliff Thorburn used to do it but Jimmy White for instance would be a player that would cue so close to the cue ball that he’d almost feather it. Occasionally over the years he did do it and it would cost him, he would always admit to the foul. But with Paul Hunter he was never going to do that because if you look back at videos of him playing his cue never got anywhere near the cue ball in his address, it was about four or five inches away. I’ve never seen anybody do that before. So, he was a complete one-off as a player and a very inspired player and I don’t think I’ve seen someone as good under pressure as him because any important pots he would get them

Foulds: If you look back on that last frame you might have thought the whole match was poor but actually... It was a terrible frame of snooker if you like. It was brilliant to watch, the drama was incredible, everyone was on the edge of their seats watching it. The standard wasn’t very good, I don’t actually think there was a century in that final. It was certainly one of the matches where there wasn’t any breaks and Steve cracked a little bit at the end. That black that he overcut to win it was not an easy shot, but he missed it by so far. It just had everyone on the edge of their seats. It’s amazing to think that Dennis won the world title that year, going into the World Championship he was clearly playing very well, he’d won his first major event the year before. But really it shows you what the game is.

White: As Neal said, Davis cracked but he (Taylor) also cracked because a couple of times he just hit the black at 100mph, he wouldn’t care who was watching, he was just hoping it went in somewhere. But I was delighted for Dennis Taylor. I remember where I was. It went on quite late, I think it was 1 O’clock in the morning but it was fantastic for the game to see Dennis Taylor win, we had 18.5 million viewers. Davis recovered very quickly; he talks about that now. He does a lot of tours with Dennis Taylor talking about that match and whether Davis is lying or not I don’t know but he seems to be OK with it.

White: It was quite incredible. Going back to that Masters where he beat O’Sullivan 10-4 and going 7-1 up that was the same sort of snooker he did against John Higgins. And it didn’t matter what John Higgins threw on him and I think he had four centuries in that final, John Higgins, so he wasn’t playing bad stuff. He was just phenomenal, Trump. Any chance of a long ball and when he was playing safe, he had John Higgins tight on the cushion and there’s just not a lot you can do. When players of that standard produce that kind of form they’re more or less impossible to beat and we saw two sessions of snooker there that we’ll probably never see again.

Foulds: I think when a player wins the World Championship for the first time you go one of two ways. When Joe Johnson won, he did get to the final the next year, but he had a pretty miserable season throughout until that final. First-time champions don’t always play the same. But in Judd’s case, the way he’s gone on in the season, which is just coming to an end, to play the way he has, he’s won six ranking events. He just wants to be a winner. He realises all the hard work that goes in means that he can do it again. I’ll be very surprised if he doesn’t win it again on more than one occasion. Three or four times minimum.