PTC 5 - the last day

06:55:00 Ramona Dragomir 0 Comments

The PTC 5 champion - Ding Junhui
So, here we are another PTC event, another final, another big winner! Yesterday the fifth edition of the Players Tour Championship picked its winner in the person of Ding Junhui!!! "The Chinese Sensation" ended the victory match on a 4-1 scoreline against Jamie Jones.
But let’s start with the beginning. Another day without proper score updates!!!! No, I’m kidding! :-P Actually I’m not...the live scoring system was down, but I’m not going to bore you with this subject, for I did it already! :-P


So, “the last 16” round was a very tense one, as each player wanted to secure himself a place into the quarter-finals. Unfortunately, the rules state that only eight players will be allowed to do so, so...you can imagine that the boys were "fighting" like knights. :-P
Rory McLeod, Ricky Walden, Ding Junhui, Dominic Dale and Marco Fu, were the ones who ended their matches on a very tight score, the famous 4-3; McLeod beat Mark Joyce, Walden defeated Allan Taylor, Ding ended Peter Ebdon`s dream to reach the quarter-finals and Fu sent Jimmy Robertson home.
Jamie Jones was the only one who booked himself a safe place into the next round by a 4-0 score against Martin Gould, Patrick Wallace defeated "The Welsh Potting Machine" 4-1 and Neil Robertson lost 4-2 to Andrew Higginson.


Next in line as I’ve said before, the quarter-finals. Things were getting more and more interesting. Ricky Walden was the first to reach the semis, as he defeated Rory McLeod 4-2, Jamie Jones made a tight 4-3 against Patrick Wallace, Ding Junhui won 4-2 over Dominic Dale and Andrew Higginson completely whitewashed Marco Fu with a 4-0 scoreline.

Jamie Jones, the runner-up
By 4:00 pm (UK time), four great players were fighting for the ultimate frontier :-)) - the big final. Only two succeeded: Ding Junhui (who beat Andrew Higginson 4-1) and Jamie Jones (who beat Ricky Walden 4-2). What happened next, you already know, for China’s dragon was the one who concluded the match 4-1 in his favor cashing the £10,000 check and the 2,000 ranking points. A wonderful performance, since the Chinese is at his first participation on this year’s PTC series. Still he will not be able to take part at the PTC finals, for he has only one PTC event in his bag. However this doesn’t` make his victory less important and if we were to think about it, considering how good Ding is playing lately he could win a major ranking tournament anytime now. ;-)


I don’t want to end today’s story without sharing with you what was like for the two players to reach the final. And what better way to do this than to present you the matches they played in. So, Jamie Jones was the one who defeated : Patrick Eisle (4-1), Liu Song (4-0), Gerard Greene (4-3), Martin Gould (4-0), Patrick Wallace (4-3) and Ricky Walden (4-2), meanwhile the little Chinese Ding beat: Tony Drago (4-3), Stuart Bingham (4-1), Stephen Lee (4-3), Peter Ebdon (4-3), Dominic Dale (4-2), Andrew Higginson (4-1) and Jamie Jones (4-1).

It wasn’t an easy road and it definitely wasn’t any bed of roses, but they did it! I know that some of the players don’t really see a point in this mini-tournaments as they consider themselves probably too important to be a part of them (take Mark Allen’s latest statement on the subject), but I personally think that this kind of competitions are a big deal, for is not just about the prize money, or about the ranking points, or the prestige, it’s also about the fact that this type of snooker marathons "create" better snooker players. They learn to play better under stress, they practice more along with great snooker names so they can reach a really high performance in snooker. Of course, that’s only my humble opinion.


So, this was it for Sheffield which closes its doors, but not for long, for on October 15, the PTC 6 event will kick off! But until then we have a lot of snooker going on. Today the qualifying rounds for the Paul Hunter English Open start and I hope that I shall find the list of participants and some scores at the end of the day, to share with my favorite snooker "termites". :-))

Congratulations to Ding Junhui for winning the tournament, but also to all the players involved in the game! Well done, boys! :-)

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)