16 Indians qualified enter knock-out round for title
Hyderabad | Friday, Nov 20 2009 IST
 

Sixteen Indians qualified for the knock-out stage of last 64 of mens event at the ONGC-IBSF World Snooker Championship 2009 being held at Hyderabad International Convention Centre here today. Out of eight Indians who played their Round of 64 matches this afternoon, 4 moved up to Round of 32. Indian maestro Pankaj Advani, with the help of a perfect blend of aggression and defence, completely outwitted Bobby Cruickshanks of Scotland by 4-0. It was quite a blow for Bobby who is an old time buddy and practice partner of a very high ranked professional player Stephen Maguire. Inspite of having a personal best of 143 in competition, Bobby today could not live up to the expectation as he went on to make a number of unforced errors during the match. Down 0-3, Bobby came back strongly in the fourth and fought neck to neck to arrive at the black-ball decider. A sitter black miss saw him ruining his chances of snatching the fourth frame from Pankaj. A brilliant safety play by Pankaj thereafter on the black ball forced Bobby commit a blunder as in an attempt to return the safety on a cushion stuck black, Bobby ricochet his white ball into the corner pocket and lost the match 0-4. In an all Indian affair, former Asian Snooker champion and top seed at the knock-out round, Alok Kumar blanked Faisal Khan by 4-0.

Kamal Chawla too posted a commendable win against his compatriot Rupesh Shah by 4-1. Another Indian Yasin Merchant, who had an advantage of 3-1 lead, squandered a golden chance on the last black on the fifth frame to win the best of 7 encounter, had to go through some anxious moments in the following frames against Chris Maltby of New Zealand. Yasin eventually won the match by 4-3. The others who reached their appointed berth of Round-32 are Tian Pengfei of China, Supoj Saenla of Thailand, Igor Figueredo of Brazil, Patrick Einsle of Germany, Alex Borg from Malta and Yu Delu of China. In the ladies section, Indias Meenal Thakur edged passed her sister Anuja Chandra by 4-3 in a closely fought battle to move up to the quarter finals. In Masters category Darren Morgan of Wales continued his fiery display of snooker to reach the round of 16 by demolishing Frank Schroder of Germany 4-0 with breaks of 71, 50 and 59 in second, third and fourth frames respectively. Chuchart Trairattanapradit of Thailand and Glen Wilkinson of Australia were the other masters who showed impressive performance by defeating SA Saleem of India and Stevie Baillie of Scotland respectively, to move up to the next round.

-- (UNI) -- 20SPD47.xml

 

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