Top 10 shots of 2021/22 snooker season: No. 8 – Mark Williams in the pink at Masters with one-handed great escape

After the conclusion of another extraordinary snooker season, we pick 10 of our favourite shots from the 2021/22 campaign as captured by the Eurosport cameras. You can vote for your personal choice when we reveal our final list of contenders this month. No.

8 – Williams produces masterful escape at Alexandra Palace Ad/> Every journey begins with a single step. Every sporting comeback begins with a single shot. Northern Ireland OpenTop 10 shots of 2021/22: No.

9 – Allen's 'toughest' yellow in iconic Belfast 147YESTERDAY AT 09:12 Mark Williams perhaps did not turn the tide with one piece of brilliance against Yan Bingtao on the opening day of the 48th Masters in January, but it certainly provided the Welshman with safe harbour as the waves threatened to crash over him. Defending champion Yan – a 10-8 winner against John Higgins in the 2021 final – enjoyed knocks of 64, 71 and 57 to lead 3-1 at the mid-session interval with Williams offering up 63 in the third frame to avoid the likelihood of a sixth defeat out of seven in the first round of the sport's biggest invitational tournament. The fifth frame was to prove a pivotal moment of mood swing.

A break of 56 was not enough to get the job done for the Welshman, who looked in peril when the unyielding Yan, already a serious strategist at the tender age of 22, left him in a potentially punishing snooker with Williams holding a nervy 16-point lead and only two balls left up. Missing the pink could have sounded the death knell on his hopes when he lined up a one-cushion escape behind the black off the top rail. Rather than size up the challenge with hand on table, the double Masters winner – who won his first title at the Wembley Conference Centre in 1998, two years before his