China wins World Cup of Pool
The final round of the 2010 World Cup of Pool, held on Sunday, was the second World Cup win for the Chinese duo of Fu Jianbo and Li Hewen, after defeating Finland in the final round of the 2007 competition, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The 2010 competition was held at Robinsons Place, Manila, in the Philippines, and as the host nation, the Philippines were allowed to present two teams for the event, while the remaining 30 teams each represented a different country.
Both local teams made it to the last 16 but Philippines A lost to Indonesia in the second round, while Philippines B defeated Spain, Finland and Taiwan in the second round, quarter-finals and semi-finals respectively.
“We are very happy with the victory but we just got the luck we needed from the Philippines team,” said Fu Jianbo.
China beat Italy at 8-5 in the second round, Indonesia at 9-3 in the quarter-finals and Germany at 9-7 in the semi-finals.
“That was a great win for us and we are feeling good about our game,” said Fu after the quarter-finals.
The final round was a first-to-10 competition, and the local crowd was in high spirits with a home team in the finals, but the Chinese pair put an end to those high spirits when they won the opening rack and never let the local team lead in the scoring.
“They made a few mistakes and we took advantage of that,” said Fu. “The Philippines team literally gave us the match because they made a lot more mistakes than we did. It was very pressured though, because it was a big pro-Filipino crowd. It was like the home court advantage so to win here, we’ve got to be very, very happy winning the tournament.”
The local team evened the score by winning the second rack, but both teams played poorly on the next three racks, with China taking advantage of their opponent’s mistakes to narrowly win both and set the score to 4-1. Orcollo, for the local team, failed an attempted snooker and Fu then missed an easy shot of his own. Li made up for his teammate’s mistake and the score was set to 5-1. Before they knew it, the score was at 9-1, and the local team was finally agitated enough to get in the game and win four racks in a row. Fu managed to roll in the final ball in the 15th rack, and the Chinese duo took the title, trophy, gold medals and 60,000 US dollars in prize money.
“It was a great performance from us and playing with Fu gives us so much confidence,” said Li Hewen. “To win the World Cup again is an incredible experience and fantastic for Chinese pool and we can’t wait to come back next year and try to defend our title.”
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