Mark Williams first met Zhao Xintong when he was a fresh-faced teenager
Mark Williams played a teenage Zhao Xintong in a 2011 exhibition
Zhao Xintong may be young for a World Snooker Championship finalist, but his association with opponent Mark Williams still stretches back well over a decade. The Chinese cueist let Williams know he was up against it by taking a commanding 11-6 lead over two sessions on Sunday.
But the three-time world champion didn't need a reminder of his prodigious talent. He first became aware of it in 2011 when, at 36 and already a two-time Crucible victor, he was taken apart by a 14-year-old Zhao in a televised exhibition event in the Hunan region of China.
"I played him in an exhibition," Williams recalled. "There’s a picture on my Twitter I think somewhere, it was about 500 people in there live. Probably 200 or 300 million people watching live [on TV].
"It was 1-1, and he knocked in 113 or 138 or something to beat me 3-1, the little s***. But here we are, playing him in the final, which is unbelievable."
The pair have faced off a handful of times since their first encounter. Following his on-screen defeat to the schoolboy prodigy, Williams got his own back by coming out on top in their first three top-level meetings.
Mark Williams and Zhao Xintong are scrapping it out for the 2025 world title
But Zhao has won their last two competitive head-to-head battles, at the China Championship in 2018 and the German Masters in 2022. He looks primed to make it three in a row by becoming the first Asian player in history to win the World Snooker Championship.
Zhao dominated the opening session on Sunday, which he won 7-1, and held his own in the second despite Williams fighting back to 11-6. This year's final presents the widest age gap between two competitors in snooker history, although that's not something the veteran Williams is shying away from.
He said: "I mean, [he's] 28 and I've got a son who is 21 years old now as well. When you put it like that, it is crazy. Xintong must feel like he is playing his grandfather in the final I suppose.
"I’ll be hobbling around there for two days, and he’ll just be running around like a whippersnapper. Brilliant. I read the other day that it could be the changing of the guard with him coming through. It probably is. It’d be brilliant if he won the world title for the sport and for China in general, but not just yet."
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