Over the Christmas period I published my annual series of ‘best of’ polls, looking to find your best match, best player and most improved players of the 2014 calendar year and what a response I had here at PSB, as the awards received significantly more votes than ever before.
Click below then for a round-up of the results, including some of the best ‘other’ votes received…
Up first, and the most voted in award of 2014 with over 1,000 votes was that for best match, which saw four of my suggestions emerge as clear front-runners, accumulating over 88% of the total votes between them.
As it happened, three of the matches were finals, all involving Ronnie O’Sullivan, with his dramatic UK Championship victory against Judd Trump at the UK Championship in December narrowly coming out on top with 24.94% of the vote.
Edged into second place was the match that saw Mark Selby become world champion for the first time at the Crucible (22.42%), while O’Sullivan’s other victory against Trump at the Champion of Champions finished third with 21.91% of the vote.
The highest match not involving O’Sullivan was that between Selby and Neil Robertson at the World Championship semi-finals, the match that received my solitary vote, while some way back in fifth was the International Championship semi-final between Mark Allen and Mark Williams.
In terms of the ‘other’ votes, there were just three such nominations this year, including Neil Robertson’s Crucible victory against Judd Trump, Mark Davis’ 6-4 victory against Liam Highfield at the UK Championship and one for ‘Ronnie Ding final’ which presumably was referring to the Welsh Open final in Newport.
While the best match award was closely contested between a number of matches, the best player award ultimately down to just two men, world champion Mark Selby and UK Champion Ronnie O’Sullivan. Though Mark was able to garner a sizeable 40.78% of the vote, he was not able to beat Ronnie to top spot, as the Rocket took 51.15% of your votes, as well as mine.
A distant third with little over 3% of the vote was Shaun Murphy, while looking at the ‘other’ votes there were two for Neil Robertson, two for Judd Trump and others for Ali Carter, Ricky Walden, Mark Allen and Oliver Lines.
Turning to the most improved player award, this was a category which saw a large number of ‘other’ votes with a whole host of players being nominated, but the winner with 37% of the vote was James Cahill, who showed clear improvement throughout the year with wins against John Higgins and Ding Junhui the stand-out results.
In second place with 25% of the vote was Matt Selt, despite Matt himself saying that he shouldn’t be a contender for this category, while Joel Walker took a respectable 20% of the vote in third.
Amongst the 10% made up of ‘other’ nominees were Judd Trump, Fergal O’Brien, Joe Swail, Alan McManus and Rod Lawler, as well as David Morris and Oliver Lines.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote this year!