2016 World Championship - Selby gets Final place

02:57:00 Ramona Dragomir 0 Comments


Mark Selby is the second finalist of this year's Betfred World Championship after beating Marco Fu 17-15 in the semi-final. Selby will now face Ding Junhui (more on his victory here) in a the grand final which will take place in the following two days.

He's won it back in 2014 and he has his eyes on the prize again - that's Mark Selby for you. The Leicester player started his semi-final snooker dispute in charge of the situation, ending the first session at 5-3 up, but soon enough it became clear that this wasn't going to be a piece of cake.

As the second session started, Selby was in with a great chance to extend his lead, but missed a red down on 52, this allowing Fu to clinch the frame on the black and go one behind his opponent.

Runs of 55 and 47 were pushing Selby at 7-4 up, but Fu answered with tremendous breaks of 135 and 114 to pull back three frames in a row and draw level at seven apiece.

Frame 15 came and with it the "tip incident" which basically meant Fu's cue-tip fell off the floor when he was chalking up his cue. It took about 15 minutes to resolve the problem, all thanks to ref Paul Collier, but that didn't stop "The Fu Force" as the Hong Kong cue-man came back to hit a break of 81 points and go 8-7 ahead.

The last frame of the session was grabbed by Selby and so the lads remained stuck at 8-8.


Not much changed during the next session, other than the standard of the match, which dropped a few notches.

The start was a bit scrappy, but Selby still managed to use a top break of 125 to add two consecutive frames, to which his opponent replied with a 108 to level the scoreline yet again, this time at 10-10.

The lads shared the remaining four frames, the first and last being won by Selby (special mention: the last one was also a record-breaker as it lasted for 76 minutes and 11 seconds - Brandon Moore you are a hero!) while the ones in between were conquered by Marco with runs of 71 and 77.

The evening started and with it the last session, this time a high-quality one in which the lads didn't stay too far away from each-other, always being separated by one frame; with Selby in the driver seat.

And so, after breaks of 63 and 101 from Selby and breaks of 98, 100 and 73 from Fu the scoreboard was showing a balanced 15-15 scoreline.

Things changed when Selby took the lead after winning a scrappy 31st frame and put his opponent in all sorts of trouble after laying some pretty awesome snookers in the following one (which incidentally was going to be the last).

And so the mission was completed, Mark Selby landing in the final after closing the deal at 17-15.

So, my dear chums we have a Ding Junhui v Mark Selby final on our hands for the next two days.

What could be more thrilling, right? The players are definitely looking forward to it and I dare say you are too ;-)

Ding will be experiencing his first ever World Championship final, so he will be definitely bringing all his skills and desire to win, while Selby will coming along with the experience of winning the world title and coping with the tension of playing in the most important matches of them all.

It can't get any better than this!

0 comments: