The extraordinary battle lasted more than an hour and a half, surpassing the 85-minute frame between Mark Selby and Yan Bingtao during the 2022 World Championship.<\/p>\n
Allen had roared back into contention after trailing 6-2 to the talented 22-year-old Wu, winning five frames in succession to lead 7-2 and scoring the highest break at the Crucible this year of 145.<\/p>\n
But the next frame turned to farce when the black blocked the right corner pocket. With Allen leading 39-13 and the eight remaining reds all clustered near the right corner, Wu and Allen took it in turns to tap reds closer and closer to the black hanging over the pocket.<\/p>\n
The result was a logjam, with the reds and the black all crammed around the corner pocket. It sent the Crucible crowd into a state of delirium, with spectators cheering every shot to the rafters as referee Marcel Eckardt desperately tried to keep control of the room.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019ve never seen a frame like it in all my years, I’ve never seen it like this, never this bad,\u201d said John Parrott, speaking on BBC Sport. \u201cThese reds are just glued to each other now \u2026 Come on ref, you\u2019ve got to do something here. You\u2019ve got to step in. This is just silly.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThis is the most bizarre frame I\u2019ve ever seen here at the Crucible Theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stephen Hendry was equally unimpressed with how Eckardt handled the situation. \u201cThe referee needs to call this, I\u2019m afraid. In my opinion he should have called it a while ago \u2026 This is the dark side of snooker.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, after an interjection from fellow referee and tournament director Rob Spencer, Eckardt called the players together to warn them he would call a re-rack unless they resolved the stalemate in their next three shots.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were hoping the black was going to drop,\u201d the referee explained to an exasperated Allen, who had no choice but to pot the black in order to keep the frame alive and protect his lead.<\/p>\n
Wu took several visits \u2013 comically fouling by potting the black in the very pocket that had caused all the fuss \u2013 but eventually got over the line to win what Hendry called \u201cthe most ludicrous frame of snooker in Crucible history\u201d, and drawing the semi-final level at 7-7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The extraordinary battle lasted more than an hour and a half, surpassing the 85-minute frame between Mark Selby…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,898,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-427957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news-ticker","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427957","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=427957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}