The Betfred.com World Snooker Championship is here and Jon Wilde looks back at one of Snooker’s Biggest Nights.

The 1985 World Championship final captivated the British public in a way no snooker match - and few matches in any sport, for that matter - have since.

The reason, primarily, was the identities of the players involved. And there was no question who the neutrals wanted to win.

On the one hand you had Steve Davis, the game’s dominant force at the time who had completely transformed snooker with the way he had burst on to the scene in the 1980s.

No longer was the green baize monopolised by elderly gents with slicked-back hair. This was a fresh-faced, ginger youngster with a rather serious, robotic demeanour. He certainly potted balls like a machine.

On the other hand you had Dennis Taylor, a happy-go-lucky Northern Irishman who wore ‘upside down’ glasses with the frames at the bottom so they wouldn’t be in his line of vision when he eyed up a shot.

On paper, it was almost a mismatch. Davis was the red-hot favourite. He had captured the sport’s most prestigious title for three of the previous four years and in reaching the 1985 showdown had dropped only 23 frames in winning the 52 required to get there.

Taylor had also been impressive on his run to the final. He had lost only 18 frames but few people thought he could trouble Davis, despite having also reached the final six years earlier. The approximate pre-match odds would have been 1/5 Davis, 3/1 Taylor.

And sure enough, those who backed Davis would have been sitting pretty after the opening session of the best-of-35-frames final.

The world No 1 whitewashed his opponent by winning all of the first seven frames, giving a sense of inevitability about what was likely to follow, especially when it became 8-0 as soon as the evening session of Saturday, April 27 began.

There was sympathetic applause for Taylor when he finally stopped the rot, but the cheers soon turned into roars of encouragement as the Ulsterman amazingly reeled off six of the next eight frames to reduce his arrears to 9-7 going into the decisive Sunday stints.

At the end of Sunday afternoon it was 13-11 to Davis. A dramatic concluding evening session was in store, but nobody could have been prepared for what occurred.

Davis got to within one frame of victory at 17-15. But Taylor dug in again and by 11.10pm he had levelled it up at 17-17, which meant a final-frame decider.

A frame of snooker can be all over in five minutes if the balls are split open and one player makes the most of a chance, but this one wasn’t. In fact it was the complete opposite of that scenario.

With the tension mounting and neither man willing to take a risk that would cost him the title, it was very much safety first. Frequently, if they potted a red, Davis and Taylor would send the cue ball back up the table and try to lay a snooker.

It was 62-44 to Davis with just the brown, blue, pink and black on the table. Taylor had to pot all four balls to win, Davis just one to leave his opponent in desperate trouble needing snookers.

Taylor sunk a brilliant long brown, then the tricky blue and pink. After 16 days and hundreds of frames, the 1985 World Championship had come down to the very last ball.

The Irish challenger attempted a double which he missed, but left the black safe. Neither man had a chance of a pot with their next shot, but then Taylor was left an opening. Nerves had taken hold of everyone, including the player as he snatched at it, missed, and left the black seemingly easy for Davis to cut into a top pocket.

But to everyone’s amazement, the greatest player in the world clipped the black too thinly and over-cut it, the ball not even rattling in the jaws of the pocket.

Ted Lowe uttered one of the most famous one-word quotes in the history of sports commentary, a simple ‘Noooo!’ as the spellbound audience gasped in disbelief.

The chance left by Davis wasn’t easy for Taylor simply because of the pressure. But he lined up the shot, drew back his cue and ‘yes, he’s done it!’ - Taylor completed one of sport’s greatest ever comebacks, punching the air with his cue in both hands and then wagging his finger towards friend Trevor East in the crowd as if to say ‘I told you so’.

That final frame lasted 68 minutes and afterwards the two men’s reactions could not have been more different. Taylor was ecstatic as he kissed the trophy, whereas Davis was visibly drained and stunned by the manner of his defeat. ‘It’s all there in black and white,’ was his famous comment when interviewed.

That brought to an end a night when 18.5 million people - the sort of TV audience these days you would expect for the final of The X Factor or a big soap opera whodunnit – stayed up past their bedtime to watch true sporting theatre, and amazingly the only Crucible final never to feature a century break.

It was the night when Britain went snooker loopy.