David Gilbert needs one more win to enter Crucible Theatre for World Snooker Championship 2011
English cueist David Gilbert needs one more win to enter the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England for his first World Snooker Championship match since 2007. He has been playing brilliantly throughout the qualifiers with his excellent potting skills beating
David Morris, Barry Pinches and Peter Lines.
Since 2001, when the world number 55 Gilbert turned professional, he has qualified only once for the televised stages of the World Snooker Championship at the Crucible Theatre in 2007. He lost to Stephen Hendry 7-10 in the first round. He defeated Alfie
Burden 10-9, Gerard Greene 10-6 and Mark King 10-6 in the qualifying rounds. In 2006, he reached to the final round of qualifiers crashing Darren Morgan 10-8, Jamie Burnett 10-8 and Tony Drago 10-7, but he faced a three-frame defeat of 7-10 at the hands of
James Wattana.
He is getting another chance today to storm into the first round of the most prestigious event of the game.
The 29-year-old Gilbert played his first qualifier against Irishman David Morris. At one stage after the interval, he was 3-5 down to Morris in his first qualifier of the Betfred.com World Snooker Championship 2011 before he grabbed back-to-back frames,
firing stunning breaks of 78 and 61 to level the game 5-5. At the end of frame 14, Morris was leading 6-8 when Gilbert took control of his nerves again and fired some pretty decent shots, pocketing four consecutive frames to clinch the game 10-8.
Gilbert faced Barry Pinches for the first time in UK Championship 2010 where he crashed him 9-4. Pinches faced the same fate here too when he was head-to-head with Gilbert in the second-round qualifier of Betfred.com World Snooker Championship 2011. Gilbert
outclassed Pinches in the first frame 74-30, with a stunning 65-break followed by back-to-back frame wins for Pinches. After six frames the score was 3-3 before Gilbert fired a beautiful century break of 129 followed by a half century break of 58 in the seventh
and eighth frames respectively.
Pinches fired his century break of 111 during the match in the 10th frame, winning it 4-118 before he took the 11th frame 51-87 to move within two frames and minimised Gilbert’s lead to 6-5. The 29-year-old Englishman extended his lead to 9-5, clinching
three consecutive frames before Pinches made it 9-7 with back-to-back frame wins. Gilbert took the scrappy 17th frame 116-8, which was the final frame of the match, with an impressive 65 break to book his place in the penultimate qualifying match against Peter
Lines.
Gilbert outplayed Peter Lines quite easily in his next-to-last qualifier 10-6 again. The 41-year-old Lines turned professional in 1991 and faced Gilbert for the first time in the World Snooker Championship 2004 where he lost to Gilbert 10-6 in the third
round of the qualifiers. Lines stunned the Englishman leading 2-0 early in the match, but was handled brilliantly by Gilbert in the next two frames to level the score 2-2.
The score levelled again 6-6 after the 12th frame before Gilbert stumbled upon the table and took four frames in a row to relive history and clinch a 10-6 victory over Lines once again. The half century in the last frame brought him the win as well as promotion
to the next round of qualifiers against Judd Trump of England today.
Before the start of the qualifiers for Betfred.com World Snooker Championship 2011, Trump has played two matches against Ben Woollaston (5-1) and Rod Lawler (1-4) with a win in the former. That makes his winning percentage 50%. On the other hand, Gilbert
also possesses the same winning ratio of 50%, as he played a total of four matches before the qualifiers with two wins and two losses. The two players have never faced each other in the world championship before. So the odds are fifty-fifty. The match is going
to run today not before 12:30pm at the World Snooker Academy in Sheffield, England.
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