While the second round match between Stephen Maguire and Ding Junhui at the Welsh Open last week will be remembered for Maguire’s excellent comeback, some very interesting footage from frame three of the match has come to my attention…
In it you can apparently see Ding potting not just one red, but another immediately afterwards to take his score from 36 to 38 before carrying on his break unchallenged. Not only have I never seen a player pot two reds in succession before and seemingly not realise it, but I find it amazing that neither referee Colin Humphries or his opponent Stephen Maguire noticed this.
My first thought was that the video must have been edited somehow but it does not look like it and so it does appear that a genuine error was made. If it does transpire that some dodgy editing has gone on though then ignore everything I have said!
Assuming that it happened, what could have contributed to this? Well it must be remembered that as the match was on table two, there was no ‘marker’ in the arena so the scoring was solely up to referee. Also nearly all of the attention that afternoon was on the Ronnie O’Sullivan/Marco Fu match taking place at the same time on the other table so this may explain why the mistake was not picked up on the TV. Even so however, it I still find it surprising that such an error seemingly went unnoticed by anyone in the arena.
Thankfully, as it turned out it did not make any difference to the outcome of the match as of course as Stephen Maguire came through to win 5-4 and book his place in the quarter-finals. Imagine the controversy had Ding gone on to win though…