• China Open Daily News – Day 3

    It’s Wednesday and the eagerly awaited return to Beijing action for Ronnie O’Sullivan.  Can you believe it is 12-months since the infamous press conference after his defeat to Marco Fu in the first round of China Open 2008. Neil Tomkins is our roving reporter.

    We’ll come back to O’Sullivan in a while.

    There seems to be a lot more camaraderie amongst the players at international events than there does at the domestic ranking events.

    Back at the players’ hotel, they swapped cues for arrows and the likes of Maguire, Harold, Higgins, Walden and Holt played darts for a couple of hours.

    Dave ‘The Power’ Harold has been practising his throw since arriving in China, but it was to no avail as ‘One-Dart’ Walden took the money!

    We sneaked off this morning to see just how ‘great’ this wall is.  And if anything, the word Great doesn’t even go close to doing it justice.  The Awesome Wall, The Spectacular Wall or The Incredible Wall might be more appropriate.  From seeing it on TV, you get no idea of the shear size of it or the terrain over which it runs for miles and miles, 600 of them in fact.

    Anyway, back at the Student’s Gymnasium, there were some unexpected results.  Mark Allen became Northern Ireland’s third man to lose his opening match in this year’s event as Stuart Pettman won 5-3.

    2006 world champion, Graeme Dott,  is beginning to look like he is getting back to somewhere near his best.  An awful 18-months on and off the table has slipped the Scot slip out of the top-32 in the provisional world rankings.  A good run here and a couple of wins in Sheffield could turn the whole thing around for Dott though.

    The other match in the afternoon was a real shocker.  Another of the Chinese wild-card entries caused a major upset as he turned over Hong Kong’s Marco Fu, who has been one of the most consistent players on tour for the past two years.

    Shaun Murphy avoided his banana skin as he took care of wild-card, Cao Xinlong with a 5-1 win to set up a last 16 meeting with Neil Robertson.

    The evening session had the makings of a classic, with world champions on three of the four tables plus the in-form Mark Selby on the other.

    It never really lived up to its billing though, as O’Sullivan scrambled to a 5-3 win over the dangerous, Fergal O’Brien, giving the Irishman plenty of chances.  Ronnie’s frustrations were vented on his cue a couple of times, but the Rocket is through and now meets Xiao Guodong.

    Selby was the most impressive of the eight players on display as he cruised to a 5-1 win against Stephen Lee.

    Stephen Hendry scraped through against Robert Milkins and Mark Williams failed to get out of first gear on the outside table and lost to Mark King, who might yet hold on to his top-16 place.

    See ya tomorrow…