KrazeeEyezKilla wrote:This was the start of the era where wild predictions of Chinese players taking over Snooker were being made. Looking back it's easy to see why people thought that. At the time Snooker was a young mans game and most people would have guessed that would continue. The success of Ding plus Maguire and Murphy winning major titles seemed to indicate a changing of the guard with a new generation taking over. O'Sullivan, Higgins & Williams all turned 30 in 2005 and you would have seen them having a gradual decline like Hendry or Davis. In a decade the new players would be in their 30's and in decline and by then there would be a post Ding wave of Chinese players ready to dominate. A lot of this did happen. Certain players went into decline and new players from China emerged but the wave hasn't been as strong as expected and a lot of the established players have shown far greater longevity than expected.
Yes, looking at the ranking event stats, the predictions did seem to bearing out:
Eight years after Ding's first ranking title, the whole of the season 2013-2014 was absolutely dominated by Chinese players, or, at least, non-English players.
Ding won 5 Ranking events and was a finalist in a sixth.
Marco Fu won one event and was runner-up in another (yes, technically Honk Kong, but you know what I mean)
Xiao Guodong was a ranking event finalist
There was even an Indian finalist, Aditya Mehta
Neil Robertson won two titles and was a finalist in two others (the other side of the world)
John Higgins & Gerard Greene were other home nations finalists (Scotland and Northern Ireland).
So of the 12 events, making 24 finalists, only 8, or one third of them (33%) were English claimed, whereas 14 of those finalist places (58%) were claimed by people from the other side of the world.
And it's more detailed than that, as the first half of that season, from Jun to Dec 2013, of the first 6 events, only 2 of the finalists were home nations, John Higgins in the first event and Mark Selby in the 6th.
So of that first half of the 2013 season 85% of finalists were from the other side of the world.
And then it just kinda didn't happen. Ding has only won 4 rankers since that season ended, less than the number he got in that one season. And no other Chinese player ever came to replicate Ding's brief dominance. Or potential dominance. Though, obviously, China has produced some great random champions here and there since then.