Castle standing taller

ELEVEN-year-old Shane Castle will next season be the youngest player on the snooker tour for the country’s top-48 under-21s.

Record breaker Shane Castle

Marchwood’s pocket rocket wrote another page in his own record book with a heart-stopping performance on the EASB Regional Junior Tour (South) at Grove SC, Romford.

A quarter-final exit in the fifth and final event clinched a top-three promotion spot to the EASB Premier Junior Tour.

Castle’s delighted coach, Dave Mumford, said: “He doesn’t look the youngest; he doesn’t act the youngest; he doesn’t go around the table as though he’s the youngest; he walks round the table like a professional.

“Everybody’s talking about how wonderfully composed he looks. And he does - we’ve worked on that.”

EASB spokesman Malcolm Thorne, brother of ex-pro Willie, said it was a “tremendous achievement” and added: “It will be an even bigger achievement to stay on the PJT next season competing against England’s top-48 juniors. However, Shane seems to take everything in his stride.”

Castle breezed through the group stage beating Kristian Kelly (Milton Keynes) 2-1, Adam Bobat (Fareham) 3-0 with a 66 break, Peter Eastland (Milton Keynes) 3-0 and lost 2-1 to Phil O’Kane (Sidcup).

However, in the third and deciding frame of a last-16 clash with James Bolton (Salisbury), Castle led by 30 with three reds – and only won it on the final black.

Mumford, 40, said: “He has a habit of getting his opponents into a really vulnerable position and then letting them off. But we can work on that.

“He’s got this knack of just doing what he needs to do, when he really needs to do it. Everybody raises their game when they play him – that’s the difficulty we have.”

After Castle’s 2-1 quarter-final defeat by Jake Gill (London), Mumford said: “It’s a fantastic achievement and he should be extremely proud.

“Our three-year plan, from eight to 11, is just coming to an end. We wanted to achieve a win at Prestatyn - we’ve done that. We wanted to get onto the (EASB Premier Junior) tour - we’ve managed to do that.

“The next three years, from 11 to 14, is a new chapter and we have to think about where we want to be and how we want to get there.”

Castle joined Chandler’s Ford SC aged seven.

He made a century (101) in a tournament in Rushden aged nine and last February was crowned Pontin’s, Prestatyn, Search for a Star under-12 champion. Last year he represented England at under-14 level.

Picture by Kevin Legg