World number 52 Scott Donaldson gained one of the best victories of his career as he beat eighth seed Mark Allen 6-1 in a late-night finish on day three of the UK Championship.<\/p>\n
Donaldson, whose father Hector died aged 70 on 2 October, was in tears as he walked to the arena before the match – the song he chose, Babylon by David Gray, was one of his dad’s favourites and played at his funeral.<\/p>\n
“Snooker is a game at the end of the day, it’s not life or death,” said Donaldson after the match.<\/p>\n
“With what I have been through, I can tell you what’s important and what’s not important. When the pressure is coming on, I just tell myself ‘it’s a game of snooker’ and get on with it.<\/p>\n
“I was fine until I got to the top of the stairs – and the last time I was in this venue was with my dad. It was good emotion though. Tough to go through but once I got the first frame, after that I was all right.”<\/p>\n
Donaldson, 31, admitted it had been “very difficult” to regain his composure during the match as he moved into a 3-0 lead over the former world number one.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland’s Allen, who won this tournament in 2022, pulled a frame back before the mid-session interval and looked well placed to make the match closer.<\/p>\n
But in an encounter full of long, tough frames, one of which lasted an hour with another around the 50-minute mark, Donaldson kept nudging closer to victory, before sealing a superb success.<\/p>\n
“It took a big character to continue playing and all credit to Scott with everything he has been through. It looked like he was giving everything on every shot,” said Allen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number 52 Scott Donaldson gained one of the best victories of his career as he beat eighth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-170198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}