Jones and Wilson reach the Belfast final: two semi-finals lost, not won

Frame ten. Sam Craigie led 5-4, one frame away from a first ranking final of his career. He bent to the table, potted the blue cleanly, then watched the cue ball follow it into the pocket. An in-off. Not a difficult shot. Not an escape from a ball glued to the cushion. Just a hand that could not hold the cue ball's line at the exact moment a whole week of snooker collapsed into one coloured ball. Craigie lost the frame. A short while later, Kyren Wilson closed out the semi-final 6-5.

At the adjacent table, an almost twin story, with a different man making the mistake. Mark Williams led 4-1 and stood over an easy yellow in frame six. Pot it and the score becomes 5-1 and the semi-final is effectively over. He missed. Jak Jones reeled off three straight frames to level at 4-4, fell behind again at 4-5, then won the last two for a 6-5 pass into the final.

Two semi-finals, two winners, four cueists. Not one century break came from either man who reached the final. That is the most telling fact of the Belfast evening, and it appears in no headline.

A tournament engineered to produce variance

The Northern Ireland Open sits inside the Home Nations Series on the World Snooker Tour — four ranking events across Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, below the Triple Crown tier but above most ordinary ranking events. BetVictor is the title sponsor. The semi-finals are best-of-11, first to six. The final is best-of-17, first to nine.

To anyone who has watched snooker for a long time, eleven frames is not a technical detail. It is a design tool. In a best-of-11, a player who drops two frames because the cue ball came off a cushion a quarter of a revolution wrong still has his chances intact. In a best-of-35 — the World Championship final format — two frames like that are swallowed whole and nobody remembers them. Short formats do not produce better cueists. They amplify the price of every error.

The British market called this the week of the underdogs. Craigie walked into his semi-final ranked 72nd in the world. Jones walked in ranked 22nd. Williams is a three-time world champion. Wilson is the reigning world champion. According to figures published by the World Snooker Tour, Wilson won the 2026 World Championship 18-14 against Jones himself.

That gulf is exactly why the evening's results read like an upset. Read the format structure instead, and they look more like the expected outcome.

The price of one yellow

These two semi-finals were lost, not won — and that is the fingerprint of the best-of-11 format.

I have watched a great many short, fast matches of this kind, and how they end rarely has anything to do with beautiful cueing. It has to do with who touched the ball last before the match decided itself.

Take Williams's yellow in frame six. In a clearance sequence, yellow is the second-lowest-value colour — after green, before brown. Missing an easy yellow at 4-1 is almost never a technical error. A three-time world champion does not suddenly lose the feel for a yellow half a metre from the pocket. That is a concentration error. The kind a man close to fifty makes once he has already played the match out in his head and started thinking about the next one.

I do not watch matches from the stands. I count the gap between two positions. The widest gap in that frame six was not on the table — it was between Williams's ear and the yellow.

Craigie's error was the exact opposite. He was on the front foot, 5-4 ahead, played a routine blue and let the cue ball drop in behind it. A pure technical error, committed by a man in a winning position. Analysts call it a technical breakdown under pressure, the moment a cueist loses control of the cue-ball cluster.

Two errors of different natures, one shared consequence: they changed who won.

Wilson scored well, but not coldly enough

Wilson finished the match with three visits of 50 or more — 54, 95 and 98 — but no century.

The breaks at 95 and 98 deserve more scrutiny than they got. In snooker, stopping at 95 or 98 usually means the cueist lost position at the very end of the visit — when transferring from the last red to a colour, or when threading through the pack. That is a cue-ball control problem in the closing stretch of a break, not a potting problem.

For a top-tier cueist, breaking down at 95 twice in the same match is a signal about precision. Not about skill. But in a best-of-17 final, where the winner is usually the man who turns one chance into a whole frame in a single visit, that is an exploitable gap.

Look across to Craigie for comparison. The world No. 72 had a century, a 56 clearance and a 55. In raw scoring quality he was not inferior to Wilson in this match at all. He lost elsewhere: the ability to close. Scoring quality that does not convert into match-closing ability — that is the fullest portrait of a talented cueist missing the final blow.

Jones occupies an entirely different spectrum. He reached the final by attrition: three straight frames to pull back from 4-1 to 4-4, then two more at the end. There is no break data for him in this match. The way Jones wins — in fragments, frame by frame, by clinging on — is the exact inverse of how Wilson wins. Over a best-of-17 final, that asymmetry matters more than ranking points.

The counter-intuitive angle: both finalists are trending down

This is hard to hear. A reigning world champion allowing the world No. 72 to drag him to a deciding frame, having led 3-1, is a form signal pointing down, not up.

Across his semi-final, Wilson led 3-1 and then let Craigie move 5-3 in front. He won only on two opponent errors in frame ten and a 56 clearance to level. Nothing in that says a man ready to win a title. It is the performance of a survivor.

The picture is the same for Jones. He reached the final through two consecutive escapes, but he never controlled the match at any point. Jones won by letting his opponent drop, not by picking things up himself. That is a legitimate tactic, but it depends on the opponent erring. In a final, the opponent is Wilson, a man whose visit quality sits a considerable distance above his.

There is a ranking fact British media tends to skip. Jones is ranked 22nd, but his biggest result is a World Championship runner-up finish — a best-of-35 event. Wilson won that very event, also best-of-35. Both are long-format cueists. The Belfast final is only 17 frames — it sits between their comfort zone and the short-format lottery. The consequence: the edge tilts to the man who can take a whole frame in one visit, and that is Wilson.

Jones's No. 22 ranking matters in the other direction too. Snooker's ranking system runs on two-season rolling prize money. His World Championship runner-up cheque will age out of the calculation. After that, his ranking trajectory is more likely to be defensive — protecting points — than offensive. This is the classic trap of the ranking finalist without a title: every further defeat gets counted, once again, as the high point of a career.

And there is a more significant name still. Craigie at world No. 72 sits below the Tour's retention line, meaning he is structurally exposed to losing his tour card. A cueist in that position walks to the table with a psychology unlike anyone else's. He needs every frame, every shot — not to reach a final, but to keep his livelihood.

What the final must be checked against

Three questions will get answers in the best-of-17 final between Jones and Wilson in Belfast.

Who turns the first visit into a frame? Wilson has the tools for it; Jones does not. If Jones drops the opening two frames by squandering visits, the match will drift beyond his reach.

Where will Wilson break down? Stopping at 95 and 98 in the same match is worth tracking. If he falls short of 100 once more in the final, it stops being coincidence.

The Belfast arena, meanwhile, will do what arenas do. At fifty-nine, I still believe something I mocked at twenty: a match is a game of one moment. That moment usually arrives in the frame where both men are tired — often the 14th or the 15th, when the cue ball starts travelling a quarter of a revolution wrong.

The two semi-finals taught me this: when a tournament is built out of short matches, players learn to trust their opponent's errors more than their own cueing. That is a dangerous habit, and a final is where it gets exposed.

Jones will walk into the final as the man who once lost 14-18 to Wilson at the World Championship. He does not need to reverse history. He only needs to reverse one yellow.