Ken Doherty makes a joke about Ronnie O’Sullivan to Stephen Hendry and Hazel Irvine (Image: BBC)
Ken Doherty left BBC colleagues in hysterics with a quip about withdrawal from the Masters. The Rocket is absent from the Triple Crown event following his last week.
After a poor run of results, he whacked the table with his cue in frustration after missing a simple pot during his 3-2 defeat to Robert Milkins. He then inflicted more damage on the cue, dumping it in a bin and pulling out of the tournament prior to his final group match against Ali Carter.
It was then confirmed that O’Sullivan had barely 48 hours before his scheduled first-round match against John Higgins, with Neil Robertson taking his place. O’Sullivan recently linked up with Lee Walker, the long-time coach of fellow ‘Class of 92’ member Mark Williams, who saw his Masters hopes in a final-frame decider on Monday.
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During an interval, 1997 world champion Doherty, seven-time Crucible king Stephen Hendry and host Hazel Irvine discussed Williams’ struggles during the match and his association 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.”
Referring to O’Sullivan’s tie-up with Walker, Doherty then revealed: “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”, leaving the trio laughing heartily.
Despite his withdrawal from the tournament, the Rocket has made an appearance at Masters with a visit to the Eurosport studio, where he for pulling out. The eight-time Masters champion said: “Yeah, it was a nightmare decision to make.
Ronnie O’Sullivan pulled out of the Masters on the eve of the tournament (Image: Getty)
“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.
“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 the damage he did to his cue, he added: “I mean, 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.”