Once a powerhouse in Southeast Asia, the Thai squad will soon be heading to the 2015 Singapore SEA Games with a modest hope of capturing two of the 10 gold medals at stake in cuesports.
Praprut Chaithanasakun (Rom Surin) is Thailand’s best hope in billiards.
It isn’t that there has been a major slump in the standards of the Thai players.
It isn’t either that the other Southeast Asian nations have improved to the extent of robing the Kingdom’s players of their due accolades.
In fact, it is the game plan that has changed.
The SEA Games host countries often want to win as many medals as possible and therefore there has been an unjustified increase in pet medal events.
In 2011, Indonesia wanted to have a cuesports competition at the SEA Games with no snooker medals at all.
However, they were reined in by the Asian federation at the time. Myanmar, when they hosted the Games in 2013, eventually settled for four English billiards medal events in which they had high chances of capturing the top honours.
The cuesports competition for next month’s SEA Games did not fail to spring its share of controversy as well.
Singapore fully realise that their best chance of winning medals in the cuesports events of the 2015 Games rest with former world professional billiards champion Peter Gilchrist, an Englishman who changed his nationality over a decade ago.
The host country wished to introduce four English billiards events with longer frames, a format that would have suited Gilchrist just fine.
This didn’t gel well with the other SEA Games countries.
As late as November last year, there were fears of an unprecedented boycott of cuesports and the man who came to the rescue of the host country was Sindhu Pulsirivong, president of the Billiard Sports Association of Thailand.
The matter was eventually resolved when Cuesports Singapore president Christopher Chuah undertook an emergency trip to Thailand and Sindhu succeeded in convincing him of revising the format for three of the four English billiards events.
With the revised shorter format of 100-plus points per frame, it isn’t Gilchrist alone who poses a major threat to the Thais as Myanmar are to be taken seriously as well.
Thai star Praprut Chaithanasakun (Rom Surin), winner of a handful of gold medals at the past regional and Asian multisport competitions, is geared up for the challenge, but partner Thawat Sujaritthurakarn is still recovering from a heart attack he suffered late last month.
He has since been given a clean bill of health to travel to Singapore for the June 5-16 Games.
Praprut is once again carrying the Thai hopes of delivering one of the four English billiards.
Thailand stand a fair chance of grabbing one of the two snooker medals with Thanawat Tirapongpaiboon (Man Nakhonpathom) and Kritsanut Lertsattayathorn (Nook Sakol) spearheading the challenge.
They are likely to be put to a stiff test by Singapore’s Chan Keng Kwang, winner of two Division Two events on the Thai circuit, and former Asian champion Thor Chuan Leong of Malaysia.
As for pool events for men and women and carom competition, Thailand should feel content if they could bring a medal of any sort home.
“We aim to win two gold medals,’’ said Thailand manager Sunthorn Charumont.
“Our best hopes are Rom Surin in billiards and Nook Sakol and Man Nakhonpathom in snooker.”