Snooker
Topic: Mark Allen fined

Does anyone else think Mark Allen's recent £10k fine and suspended ban is ridiculous?

I understand players can't be seen to be unprofessional but he's right what he says and wasn't nasty or abusive in his press conference.

Am I missing something here?

From Pro9's "Industry News" section, yesterday...
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WPBSA Statement - Mark Allen

The Disciplinary Committee of the WPBSA has formally considered the case of Mark Allen in relation to his comments in a press conference on Sunday 22nd April 2012 following his defeat in the Betfred.com World Championship at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. In this conference he accused his opponent Cao Yupeng of cheating and said that cheating appeared to be a trait of Chinese players. He named two other Chinese players as being known for cheating.

This follows on from a previous case where Mark was fined £1,000 and warned as to his future conduct for comments he made about China and the Chinese people on twitter.

The Disciplinary Committee found that he is in breach of the following members rules:

1.1 Members shall, at all times (i.e. whether at a Tournament or not), behave in a proper and correct manner consistent with their status as professional sportsmen. Members shall not do anything which is likely to intimidate, offend, insult, humiliate or discriminate against any other person on the grounds of disability, their religion, race, colour or national or ethnic origin, sex or sexual orientation.

1.2 A Member shall not make or cause to be made any statement or commit or cause to be committed any act which in the reasonable view of the WPBSA is likely to bring into disrepute the games of snooker and/or billiards.

He was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £1,000 towards the cost of the hearing and was suspended from playing for a period of three months. This suspension will only come into effect if he commits any new breach of the WPBSA Members Rules that are dealt with by the WPBSA Disciplinary process in the next six months. He has also been required to undergo media training.

The WPBSA Disciplinary Committee consider that this behaviour is unacceptable and offensive to China and the Chinese players. Such behaviour will not be tolerated by the WPBSA.
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If someone said British players were known for being cheats we'd probably shrug it off and ignore it as sour grapes, but when you generalise in a negative manner about the nationality of a lot of snooker's new sponsors - you are at worst bordering on racism and at least biting the hand that feeds you.

It might be OK to think it, but pretty daft to broadcast it in the press conference or on Twitter to your fans - although pretty understandable in the heat of the moment if he feels he was robbed.

As he'd been warned before, it would have been wisest to bite his tongue - but then on the other hand we wouldn't know how he feels on the matter.

Many pool players do exactly the same during pool tournaments.

Does anyone have a link to a video of the press conference in question?

And yet Ding Junhui only gets fined £250 for saying: "Don't think the table's right, don't think fans are right, all rubbish, rubbish fans".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkvqPWXaxOM

On 2012-06-13 13:59 , BigDave Wrote:

Link

Most of that press conference is spent talking about how well the guy played so why didn't anyone pick up on that?

There was only a brief few words where he said that there's a trait some of the upcoming Chinese players have.

To me that is fair enough because he's obviously talking about Cao and the 2 others he's named before.

Considering most of the audience at the Crucible would be English, I'd argue that if Mark Allen is racist then Ding is far more so.

It is basically the media bringing insignificant comments like Allen's to the forefront just to get headlines and that's appalling.

He is right, I think the comments were taken out of context.

I think what he meant to imply was that the etiquette of the game is different to what it is over here.

Over here we are brought up to admit fouls and that kind of thing. I think what he was trying to imply was that they are not brought up in the same way we are, not trying to be racist at all.