Former professional star Mutalieb Allie ended a lengthy wait for top honours when he was crowned the singles champion in the SPAR South African snooker championship in Port Elizabeth at the weekend.<\/p>\n
The 44-year-old Allie, from Lansdowne in Cape Town, defeated his Goodwood clubmate, Tariq Samsodien, 7-3 in Saturday’s final at the Hellenic Hall to win the national title for the first time.<\/p>\n
There was a sense of relief for the Cape Town star, who had contested four previous finals but had been on the losing side each time.<\/p>\n
“Yes it is very nice to be the champion at last, but I must say after I had won I didn’t feel any different,” said Allie, who played professionally in the United Kingdom for two years in the mid-nineties.<\/p>\n
“Although I think if I had lost I wouldn’t have felt very good about it.”<\/p>\n
He added that there had been some nerves ahead of the final, although playing against his clubmate and good friend did “take a bit of the edge off” the game.<\/p>\n
“There is always tension in a situation like this, especially as each year I had been knocking on the door. People were always telling me, you will get a chance next year.<\/p>\n
“But playing against Tariq made it a bit easier, because we have contested many finals and we know each other’s games.<\/p>\n
“When you are in that situation [playing against a friend], you don’t mind so much what the outcome is. I’m sure he was happy for me because he has won the title twice before.”<\/p>\n
His strategy in the final was to try to play as safely as he could, said Allie, who has represented South African on a number of occasions.<\/p>\n
“Your main focus is just to make sure you pot the balls and have one or two decent breaks to make it easy to win the frame.<\/p>\n
“When I went 3-0 up in the final I started to feel more comfortable, but I still had that hurdle to get over so the nerves were always there.”<\/p>\n
Allie said he came into the tournament with expectations of doing well, but his strategy was never to look too far ahead.<\/p>\n
“You are always aiming to win, because that is why we compete.<\/p>\n
“But with those sorts of expectations can come disappointment, so it is a matter of taking it game by game and day by day.”<\/p>\n
He said adapting to the conditions was testing as the tables had been re-clothed.<\/p>\n
“When you play on practice tables, the conditions can be different to the reconditioned tables we had for this tournament.<\/p>\n
“This is always a challenge in South Africa because tables differ from club to club, venue to venue and city to city.<\/p>\n
“When you get to a certain level, it’s the small things that make a difference and that is something you have to adjust to.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former professional star Mutalieb Allie ended a lengthy wait for top honours when he was crowned the singles champion in the SPAR South African snooker championship in Port Elizabeth at the weekend. The 44-year-old Allie, from Lansdowne in Cape Town, defeated his Goodwood clubmate, Tariq Samsodien, 7-3 in Saturday’s final at the Hellenic Hall to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":58746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3605,3593,1759,3606],"class_list":["post-19779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-more-sport","tag-mutalieb-allie","tag-snooker","tag-spar-eastern-cape","tag-spar-south-african-snooker-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}