Snooker Championship League (group 6) - "The Pistol" Allen claims victory

Group`s 5 winner - Mark Allen

Some very entertaining couple of days for snooker as the Group 6 players tried to prove their skills in order to obtain a safe place for the Groups Final. Although at the end of the first day Stephen "The Bulldog" Lee assumed his leadership position, things were going to chance dramatically after the second one. It wasn’t that Stephen didn’t make though the final stages, because he did reach the final, but there was someone else that was struggling with the Group’s final and needed to work that out ;-) For those of you who followed Snooker Championship League these last past months you know that Mark Allen reached two finals but also lost them and since at the end of Day 1 he won just one single match his chances didn’t seem too bright at that moment...but in the end things turned out to be just right for Northern-Ireland’s boy :-P


The first day saw Stephen Lee taking the lead with 3 points, earned by winning three out of four matches (he crashed Mark King 3-0 and ended on a very tight 3-2 scoreline with Judd Trump and Mark Allen), and closely followed by Mark King, Matthew Stevens and Judd Trump with two points each. Liang Wenbo, Mark Davis and Mark Allen were sitting at the bottom with just one lonely point and although Allen’s last match was a total whitewash for he combined breaks of 67, 103 and 101 to defeat Mark King, he seemed to be a bit too tense. Probably because this was his third attempt to get a place for the Groups Final.


However, the second day was a very different one! Judd Trump, after a very good run during Day 1 and after he won two out of three matches, didn’t seem to get his way among the balls and lost all three matches, this meaning that with only 2 points he was eliminated from the competition; this also being the case for Mark Davis, who only had 1 point after two days of constant battle.

Stephen Lee along with the ref A. Chamberlain

Knowing to whom we were saying "bye, bye" we had to take a look at who we’re going to keep for the semis and who will be sent to Group 7 and that wasn’t an easy task as the scores were tight as hell. So, after a careful examination we could see that Liang Wenbo was going to team up with Group 7, while Mark Allen, Mark King, Matthew Stevens and Stephen Lee were through to the semifinals.


Matthew Stevens didn’t have much to object to the fact that he was crashed with a 3-0 final result by Mark Allen, who was storming out to reach the final and win it, while Mark King was being hammered with breaks of 74 and 77 by the mighty Stephen Lee 3-1.
The final was a very strategic battle and if you well remember I told you that the first frame between Ryan Day and Mark Allen (back when Group’s 5 final was on) was a psychological threshold for it was won by Ryan just by a few points ahead this having a major impact on how the rest of the match kept going. This was also the case for Allen v. Lee first frame, only that this time Allen was the one to claim it with a 64-59 lead. After that things seemed a bit more easily to handle so 'The Pistol" fired in runs of 71 and 119 to finally win a CL final.


Here are the results for Day 1:


And the results for Day 2:


Semi-finals:


Final:


So if you don’t succeed the first time - try again; if you don’t succeed the second time - keep going … it might be the chance of your life to win the third...at least it was for Allen ;-)