World Cup of Pool day two recap: England, France, Japan and Poland win
In the second day of 2010 World Cup of Pool, England and France took the eight against their respective opponents and will move on to the next round at Robinson’s Place, in Manila. England faced stiff competition from their Qatari opponents, Bashar Hussain and Mohammad Bin Ali, competing for their fifth time in the event. The English pair of Daryl Peach and Karl Boyes won the match at only 8-7.
“No disrespect to them but that would’ve been my worst defeat ever,” said Boyes. “You set yourself goals and one of my goals coming here is to not just win the tournament but to play and beat the Philippines in the semi-finals.”
The match was riddled with mistakes and the Qatari pair did an excellent job of exploiting them and bring the English to the edge of defeat. Boyes managed to sneak in a decent shot at just the right time to set the winning clearance.
“That was an off day,” said Peach. “We got lucky but we’re still in it and a lot of the other teams will be peeved that we’re still in it. We were very below par, probably about 20 per cent of what we would be usually, but we’re over the moon to get through.”
France faced Australia in the other morning session, which was similarly plagued with mistakes but ended for France at 8-5. If Francois Cottance and Stephan Cohen do not improve their game, they won’t last long in the Cup, despite their win against the Australian pair of James Delahunty and Rick Emery.
In the afternoon, Poland squeezed into the last 16 by beating the hopeful Maltese duo of Tony Drago and Alex Borg at 8-6 in the second match of the 3.00 session. The Polish pair, Radoslaw Babica and Mariusz Skoneczny, fell behind early 3-1. Malta came very close, gaining a 6-4 lead before Poland got their act together to win the match.
“It was a nervous match because there was something on our minds as we were playing without our own cues which were lost on the plane,” said Babica. “We borrowed cues from the Russians so it wasn’t easy to play with that on our minds and became hard to concentrate, but we had a bit of luck.”
The first match of the afternoon saw the Japanese pair, Naoyuki Oi and Toru Kuribayashi, narrowly beating the Slovenian team of Matjaz Erculj and Matej Sulek at 8-7 in the final rack. The Japanese will take on the strong Taiwanese team in the next round.
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