2019 World Cup - China unfairly good?

As the snooker season resumes, it’s time for the big stars to head to Wuxi, for the biennial World Cup.

23 nations and 24 teams will be trying to bring the trophy to their countries - or in China’s case, make it stay again. The Chinese have two teams and are looking to make it four straight wins. Let’s have a look at each group and see what lies ahead:

Group A
China A (Ding Junhui and Yan Bingtao)
Thailand (Thepchaiya Un-Nooh and Noppon Saengkham)
Poland (Adam Stefanow and Kacper Filipiak)
Austria (Andreas Ploner and Florian Nuessle)
Norway (Kurt Maflin and Christopher Watts)
Germany (Simon Lichtenberg and Lukas Kleckers)

Group A has of course, one of the red hot favourites in China A. Ding Junhui and Yan Bingtao are both former winners and will pair for the first time, now that Yan has become China’s second best. 

Though, two teams make it to the playoffs and it’s still open. Thailand of course have a very good team, but I can see Germany or Poland getting into the mix at some point, and Norway has Kurt Maflin of course.

Group B
Northern Ireland (Mark Allen and Jordan Brown)
England (Kyren Wilson and Jack Lisowski)
Iran (Hossein Vafaei and Soheil Vahedi)
Republic of Ireland (Ken Doherty and Fergal O’Brien)
Hong Kong (Andy Lee and Ka Wai Cheung)
Saudi Arabia (Omar Alajlani and Ahmed Aseeri)

Group B is maybe the most interesting one. Of course we’ve got England, record holders with four titles - a very good team with Kyren Wilson and Jack Lisowski, even though it would’ve been better if either Ronnie, Trump, Selby or Hawkins had not surprisingly decided not to play for whatever reason. 

It’s still the best team in this group, but it’ll be very disputed once we’ve got Iran in here (the same team that made the last 8 in 2017), Ireland (two good players that could carry this team deep) and Northern Ireland (if Jordan Brown steps up, all Allen needs is a good pairing to give Northern Ireland a chance).

Marco Fu will be a missing star in this tournament, but Hong Kong will miss him even more. They couldn’t make the playoffs in the last World Cup with him, never mind without. 

Group C
Scotland (John Higgins and Stephen Maguire)
Belgium (Luca Brecel and Ben Mertens)
Malaysia (Thor Chuan Leong and Moh Keen Hoo)
Israel (Eden Sharav and Sachar Ruberg)
United Arab Emirates (Mohamed Shehab and Mohammed Al Joaker)
Cyprus (Michael Georgiou and Antonis Poullos)

Scotland have the best team of this year’s World Cup in my opinion. Both Higgins and Maguire had decent runs at the Crucible and we know how that World Championship form can be brought into the World Cup. They’ve also been playing together for a while now and Higgins himself was present in Scotland’s only World Title in 1996. 

Of course in the previous World Cups they arrived as one of the favourites too, losing to the underdogs in the 2015 final and failing to make it past group stage in 2017. However, at least this time they’re likely to have an easy start - Belgium is the only team that can stand up to them in this group, and if their performance in 2017 is anything to go by, it’s not a secret which teams will be making the knock-out stages out of Group C.

Group D
Wales (Mark Williams and Ryan Day)
China B (Zhou Yuelong and Liang Wenbo)
Switzerland (Alexander Ursenbacher and Luis Vetter)
Malta (Alex Borg and Brian Cini)
Australia (Steve Mifsud and Ryan Thomerson)
India (Himanshu Jain and Lucky Vatnani)

We’ll always see surprising results in every tournament, but in Group D it’s hard to see past Wales and China B.

In particular, even though they’re not even the main team, China B are also one of the red hot favourites to win the title this year. Both Liang Wenbo (2011 and 2017) and Zhou Yuelong (2015) have won the World Cup before, and if they make a good duo they’ll be a great help in China’s quest to level England on 4 World Cup wins. 

It doesn’t mean that the other teams in this group, or teams that I’ve not mentioned in previous groups, can’t make themselves justice - in fact the last two World Cups showed that we can have a tournament like this with 23 nations putting together teams that can compete playing high level snooker.

But I can’t see any of these teams stopping China or Belgium here. Australia doesn’t even have Neil Robertson, and although we know how India can be good at snooker, neither Pankaj Advani nor Aditya Mehta will be on their squad this year.

But who’s under more pressure in Wuxi?

Well, for the tradition, the British teams will always have high expectations on. The pressure on England is lifted a bit once their main stars won’t be around, but they haven’t won the title since the 80’s with Steve Davis and co., so I’m sure the Englishmen back home will take no excuses. I think that’s a very good team though and wouldn’t be surprised if they won. 

As for Scotland, their last two results have been disappointing - you can’t fault a run to the final in 2015 but a group stage elimination in 2017 is something that their supporters won’t afford to see again. 

But the nation under more pressure is of course China. I know they’ve won the last three, but playing in front of their own crowd, knowing how the Chinese fans love snooker, especially in Wuxi since the Wuxi Classic days, and considering the fact that they have not one, but two very good teams, they’re the ones that will have the biggest weight on their shoulders.

I think it won’t be a problem though, they’ll step up to it and win the title. The question is: is it fair that they have two teams?

At first when they staged the first World Cup of the “Wuxi era” in 2015, it felt like China had two teams because they could only get 23 nations and used the fact that they were the hosts as an excuse to give China a B team.

But then it didn’t change in 2017 and now it’s clear that they’re giving China a B team regardless of the scenario. Brazil wasn’t added to the World Cup this year, even though being very competitive in both 2015 and 2017, beating Scotland and Wales and coming close of a playoff spot on both occasions. 

You can’t give the hosts a B team once the event is in Wuxi every year, it’s clearly unfair! And also, when you take somebody else’s spot out to give them a secondary team, it’s total shambles.

It’s not the first time World Snooker takes a path towards where the money is and not the way forward, but in an event like this it sounds bad and doubles the chance of China winning it.

I’ll nevertheless follow the tournament and I’m excited for it. It’s not the same without Brazil for me, but it’s still one of my favourites and they don’t happen that often.