Day one in Shanghai and the final three wildcard matches (plus the climax of the Hamilton match and the qualifying tie between Wenbo and Mahitthi) have now been completed. Click below to find out what happened.
Category: Shanghai Masters
Roewe Shanghai Masters 2008: Day One – White Gains Wildcard Revenge
Day one in Shanghai and the first of the wildcard matches are now being completed. Click below to find out what has happened so far as the likes of Jimmy White, Ricky Walden, Judd Trump and Anthony Hamilton are in action this morning.
Roewe Shanghai Masters 2008: Day One Schedule
Nearly a month on since the qualifiers for this tournament (feels like longer doesn’t it?), tomorrow marks the start of the second ranking event of the season, the Roewe Shanghai Masters. Click below to see the schedule and which matches will be on the TV table:
Roewe Shanghai Masters 2008: Meet the wildcards!
With the second ranking event of the season just days away, now is a good time to have a look at the seven wildcards who will be in action on the first two days. Thanks again to Sina Snooker who have provided me with the following photographs to use:
Where next for Ding Junhui?
Image supplied by Janie Watkins
With the Shanghai Masters coming up soon, now appears to be the perfect opportunity to consider the career of China’s best ever player Ding Junhui and to consider possible reasons for his recent struggles in ranking events.
Rise to stardom
Having started playing snooker at the age of nine, by the time he was fifteen he was already skilled enough to win the Asian Under 21 championship, Asian Championship and IBSF World under 21 Championship in 2002.
His rapid progress continued on the main tour where having turned professional in 2003, he recorded an impressive win over Joe Perry on his debut at the Wembley Masters in 2004. A year later he remarkably managed to capture his first ranking event title on home soil in China, a victory that significantly raised his profile, and that of snooker full stop in his homeland.
Soon after he managed to show that this was no fluke by winning the UK Championship and Northern Ireland Trophy – all before he reached the age of 20 which was a remarkable achievement, matched only by Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins.
At this point in time I was beginning to think that he could really be in a position to push on and possibly be one of the favourites for the Word Championship that season, maybe even challenging for a place at the very top of the rankings. He appeared to be nerveless, have all the shots required and although he did not always perform in the qualifying matches at Prestatyn, he appeared to have the temperament to handle himself on the big occasions.
Masters 2007
Returning to London for the Wembley Masters, Ding started the tournament in fine form, making his first career 147 in his opening match against Anthony Hamilton before going on to reach the final where he would face local favourite Ronnie O’Sullivan. Despite making a strong start to the match, Ding soon found himself overwhelmed by a combination of O’Sullivan’s incredible play and the boisterous, hostile home crowd. This continued to a point where Ding appeared to have all but given up and in fact tried to concede the match with O’Sullivan still one frame from victory. He continued after the mid-session interval however and his concession was attributed to him thinking that the final was a best of 17 match.
Image supplied by Janie Watkins
This was not the first time that Ding had appeared vulnerable to a partisan crowd however as just three months before during a Premier League match with Jimmy White, he appeared to again struggle to cope with the atmosphere, losing the match 5-1.
Since these defeats Ding just hasn’t looked like quite the same player to me, something borne out by the fact that he has not reached the semi-finals of a ranking event in the last 18 months. Although he remains a member of the top 16, Ding’s temperament has also increasingly looked questionable at times and his opponents have been able to take advantage of this.
What are the possible reasons for this? At 21 he is of course still very young and it cannot be easy to come up against a partisan crowd at Wembley like he did, particularly being in a foreign country halfway across the world from his homeland.
A season and a half has passed since that defeat however and it makes me wonder whether there is a deeper problem at the moment. Could it be that Ding is struggling with the pressure of leading China’s hopes at the very top of the game? The growth and interest in the sport over there is huge at the moment and particularly given his earlier successes, perhaps the levels of expectation placed upon him are causing him problems. Only Ding can answer this but if there is some truth to that theory then hopefully the emergence of Liang Wenbo this year will help to take some of the attention away from him.
The future
At just 21 years old he should still have the best years of his career ahead of him and you don’t simply lose the talent that fired him to those three titles a couple of years ago. Something needs to change however as having made a slow start to this season by losing his opening matches on the ranking circuit and the Premier League, Ding’s confidence will not be high at the moment. A good run in front of his home crowd in the upcoming Shanghai Masters might just give him the lift that he needs, though he will have to play well from the start to defeat the in-form Dave Harold. We shall see.
Roewe Shanghai Masters Wildcards
It would appear that there will be seven wildcards appearing in the main draw for the Roewe Shanghai Masters this month. Their matches will be played on Monday 29th September and according to this document, and the official tournament format, this will mean that the schedule is:
Monday 29 September
3pm
Ricky Walden v Zhang Alda
Judd Trump v A Bu La Jiang
Jimmy White v Xiao Guodong
Anthony Hamilton v Li Yan
7.45pm
Andy Hicks v Li Yuan
Tom Ford v Yu Delu
Stuart Pettman v Cao Xinlong
Also taking place on the Monday evening will the qualifying match held over from Prestatyn between Liang Wenbo and Atthasit Mahitthi. The winner will play Mark Allen for a place in the last 32 on Tuesday morning.
Davis goes back to basics
Steve Davis may have six world titles and countless other tournament victories on his CV but he still hasn’t given up trying to improve his game according to the Eurosport website.
He is quoted as saying:
“I noticed I wasn’t striking the ball in the centre,” Davis said. “I was favouring cueing on one side and it was affecting my alignment.
“It’s all weird. All the shots seem different. I didn’t expect results overnight. I expected to struggle and miss the balls by miles but actually I didn’t pot too badly.
“I was trying to play quite basically so any win is a good win. I’m not going to criticise myself. I got through.”
For a man starting what I believe to be his 30th season as a professional to come out and indicate that he is working on his game in such a fundamental way is remarkable really, particularly given what he has achieved in the game. Having slipped out of the top 16 again at the age of 51 and with a full-time career as an analyst with the BBC waiting for him, some might have expected Davis to slip quietly into the background and concentrate on other activities now.
That would be to underestimate Steve’s love of the competition, or perhaps more to the point the game of snooker full stop however. Anyone who has remained at the top of the game for as long as he has won’t want to go down without a fight and it is good to see that he is still seeking to improve his level even now.
Make no mistake, he may have tried to downplay his win against Gerard Greene in the Shanghai Masters qualifiers but Greene is a very dangerous player to face at that stage and any kind of win for Steve was always going to be a good one. His reward in Shanghai will be a tie with Dominic Dale in the last 32 in what could be a close match. Dale, who is entering the event as defending champion, is in good form having pushed Mark Allen all the way in Northern Ireland and will fancy his of chances of making it to the last 16 again. One thing that is certain however is that Davis will do his utmost to stop that from happening.
Higgins v White Exhibition Footage
Last night in Telford snooker legends Jimmy White and Alex Higgins faced each other in an exhibition match as reported in the on the Shropshire Star website.
Within the article is a video news report containing footage from the evening and an interview with Jimmy. In it, he talks both about his own recent form and an upcoming tour of the south coast that he will be starting with Higgins in January 2009. The match for what it is worth ended 2-2, though from the brief highlights on the video it is clear that the evening was all about the entertainment as you would expect from these two.