Day two at the 2011 World Cup has now come to a conclusion and while there were wins for the three fancied nations in this event, Polish youngster Kacper Filipiak continued to surprise with two singles victories…
When I saw Kacper in action for the first time at the South West Snooker Academy recently it was obvious that the left-handed youngster could pot the balls. As I remarked at the time however, as one would expect his game appeared to be somewhat raw and I did not see him winning too many qualifiers at such an early stage in his career.
Little more than a few weeks on however he has now beaten Marco Fu, Stephen Maguire and reigning world champion John Higgins in front of the television cameras, the latter two falling today as the unfancied Poland team put up a great fight against Scotland.
Unfortunately I was not able to watch the matches but from reading around the internet it is apparent that many onlookers were impressed, notably Ronnie O’Sullivan who on Twitter declared that he will be a world champion while Higgins compared him to a young Stephen Hendry.
Despite Kacper’s efforts it was Scotland who were able to win the other two singles matches as well as the doubles frame to win the match 3-2 but with the groups decided purely on frames won it was by no means a bad result for Poland to only lose by the odd frame.
Elsewhere in the group, Hong Kong won their first match of the tournament, 3-2 against an Afghanistan team who have now lost both of their first two matches. That said, given the rather strange format which sees groups decided on the basis of frames won rather than points, having narrowly lost their matches so far, Afghanistan actually remain well in touch of the other teams in the group at this stage.
As for the other big guns, England predictably made a good start by getting four frames on the board against Brazil, while Wales went one better and whitewashed Egypt 5-0 to move to the head of group A immediately. The main points of interest in those matches actually proved to be the doubles frames which saw Brazil pip England with a fantastic clearance while Welsh duo Matthew Stevens and Mark Williams put together a break of 97 under the alternate shot format.
The doubles format has probably proved to be the main talking point from this tournament so far as opinions concerning the alternate shot system continued to be mixed, though I must confess I have probably not seen enough of the action to pass first-hand comment for myself yet.
For all of the scores from today and the latest tables, please click here.