Alan McManus

Alan McManus

Alan McManus at the 2014 German Masters
Born	(1971-01-21) 21 January 1971 (age 46)
Sport country	Scotland
Nickname	Angles The Mac
Professional	1990–
Highest ranking	6 (4 years)
Current ranking	28 (as of 18 December 2016)
Career winnings	£2,517,523
Highest break	143 (1994 World Snooker Championship)
Century breaks	212
Tournament wins
Ranking	2
Non-ranking	2

Alan McManus (born 21 January 1971) is a Scottish professional snooker player. A mainstay of the world's top 16 during the 1990s and 2000s, he has won two ranking events, the 1994 Dubai Classic and the 1996 Thailand Open, and was a World Championship semi-finalist in 1992, 1993 and 2016. He also won the 1994 Masters, ending Stephen Hendry's five-year, 23-match unbeaten streak at the tournament with a 9–8 victory in the final.

McManus has long been considered a consistently good player, having a record of fourteen consecutive seasons in the Top 16, but never managed to achieve the success of his contemporaries Stephen Hendry, Ken Doherty, Ronnie O'Sullivan and John Higgins. He was ranked in the Top 16 from 1990 to 2006, dropping out after an unsuccessful 2005/2006 season. His highest ranking was sixth (in 1993/94 and 1996/97). He has reached twenty-one professional semi-finals, but won only four events. He has reached the semi-finals of the World Championship three times, but has never appeared in a final. Until 2005, McManus had gone eleven years without reaching the quarter-finals of the tournament, despite consistent achievements in other events.

The highlight of his career to date has been claiming the Masters title at Wembley in 1994, defeating Stephen Hendry 9–8 in the final and thus ending Hendry's unbeaten run in the tournament, which dated back to 1989.

His last major final was at the 2002 LG Cup at the Preston Guild Hall where he lost 5–9 to fellow-countryman Chris Small.

A series of poor results in the 2005–2006 season saw him drop out of the top 16 for the first time since 1991. He reached the semi-finals of the 2006 Snooker Grand Prix, losing to Neil Robertson. He lost a World Championship qualifier 10–9 to journeyman Joe Delaney in 2007. This loss began an extremely quiet six-to-seven-year period for McManus, who then failed to qualify for any UK or World Championships between 2007 and 2013, and also struggled to qualify for the other ranking events (during the period between the 2006 Grand Prix and the 2013 Welsh Open, he failed to qualify for the main stages of 42 ranking events). This loss of form saw him quickly drop out of the top 16, then out of the top 32. His poor form reached a trough in the 2009/2010 season, where he failed to qualify for any of the main stages of the tournaments he took part in.