Tom Ford won the last two frames to edge Martin Gould 4-3 and win the eleventh Players Tour Championship event of the season in Sheffield.
It is the Englishman’s second professional title after claiming a PTC title during the last campaign in 2010 but today’s victory marks the 28 year-old’s first on television.
Ford is well-known on the circuit for being a player who thrives on confidence and showed excellent determination in comfortably reaching the final today.
The Leicester man sandwiched a pair of whitewashes over China’s Yu Delu and Graeme Dott of Scotland with a 4-1 defeat of recent UK champion Judd Trump.
In the final, the opening four frames were shared but it was Ford who appeared to be the more likely to press on in a scrappy affair with the relatively bigger breaks of 66 and 60.
However, Gould, who was runner-up in PTC 6 last year as well as the Grand Finals in Dublin last spring, produced the goods in the fifth to edge one ahead thanks to a century break of 127.
The Englishman failed to press on, though, and claim his maiden pro title – not counting the 30 year-old’s Power Snooker victory last month – and Ford forced a decider before a cool clearance of 66 was enough to emerge victorious.
Gould had earlier seen off Simon Bedford and Michael Holt before coming from 3-1 behind to pip Anthony Hamilton in a long semi-final battle.
Like Holt, who won PTC 10 a few weeks ago, Ford is a player that has all the capabilities in the world to be a player that can cause a significant amount of damage in the game but struggles to maintain a high level of consistency in his performances.
That said, there is no reason why he could not build on this success over the course of the remainder of the season and put in a conscious effort to challenge for a place among the elite top 16 in the world rankings.
Speaking of the top 16, Ronnie O’Sullivan will be thanking his lucky stars tonight after seeing Mark Davis narrowly lose to Hamilton in the quarter-finals and thus safeguarding his place within the bracket for now.
Davis, a professional on the Main Tour for 20 years, has never made it into the top 16 – with it coming the guarantee of a place at the venue stage of the next bunch of ranking events – and definitely felt the pressure as he failed to see off the ‘Sheriff of Pottingham’ while 3-2 ahead.
The win would have secured his place and knocked the ‘Rocket’ out in the process but it was not to be.
O’Sullivan’s status still lie in the balance as Ricky Walden can dislodge the former world number one if he can win PTC 12 in Munich at the turn of the New Year.
Nevertheless, congratulations to Tom Ford who wins the final event of 2011.
What a year it has been and over the course of the next couple of days SHQ will look back at some of the highlights.
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