Top 10 moments of 2022/23 snooker season: No. 9 – Mark Selby compiles ultimate 147 maximum in World Championship final

After the conclusion of another extraordinary snooker season, we pick 10 memorable moments from the 2022/23 campaign as captured by the Eurosport cameras. You can vote for your personal favourite when we reveal our final list of contenders later this month.

No. 9 – Mark Selby compiles ultimate 147 in world final

On the 40th anniversary of the maiden 147 break at the World Championship in Sheffield, it was perhaps fitting that we witnessed the first maximum in the final of the sport’s blue-chip event.

With 155 of the 189 competitive maximum breaks compiled this century, it feels like they play a different game since ‘The Grinder’ studiously plotted his path to his historic break.

Yet the unfettered joy of those feted 147 moments remain as poignant in the potting world’s modern era as when a gasping commentator Jack Karnehm famously muttered “Good luck, mate” before Cliff lined up the final black amid a groundswell of awe-struck adulation.

The fifth maximum of Mark Selby’s celebrated career was a landmark moment with nobody having managed the feat in a world final since the Crucible Theatre first housed the World Championship in 1977.

Trailing 9-6 to Luca Brecel in the second session of the final, Selby produced an emphatic response with a 147 that never seemed in any doubt as he cherry-picked 14 reds before teasing the 15th and toughest red down a side rail and into a top pocket with the rest.

The colours followed with an excitable sense of expectation.

“Just to make a 147 here is hard enough,” said Selby. “I always thought that if I got myself in that position then I would be shaking like a leaf, but it was amazing how calm I felt.”

It was to be the 14th 147 witnessed at the Crucible and the second of th 2023 event after Kyren Wilson produced the 13th against Ryan Day in the first round.

A split of £40,000 was the modest returns for both men, such is the regularity of 147 breaks these days, but this was special without the need for huge monetary rewards.

Selby prompted a ‘Mexican Wave’ as the four-time world champion remained inside the Crucible to revel in the significance of despatching perhaps the ultimate 147 in snooker history.

“The atmosphere when I potted that final black was electric and it was nice to give them a bit of banter back to keep them cheering,” he said.

Selby would lose the final 18-15 to an inspired Brecel, but recording such a maximum for his personal collection of memoirs was not a bad consolation prize in the sport’s grandest occasion.

“The last black to get on the last red down the rail, he played it to perfection. He just had to drop the red in there.

“To have a 147 on your CV at the World Championship, that’s another thing in his fantastic list of achievements. He’s absolutely buzzing.”

In making his mark, Selby’s majestic 147 was a regally unique occasion in its own right.

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