MANILA, Philippines—Dennis Orcollo and Roberto Gomez did away with a lot of the clowning antics and flashed their sharpest form yet in the World Cup of Pool Saturday night.
The third-seeded Filipinos made one of the most formidable teams in the field look like they didn’t belong as they showed Mika Immomen and Markus Juva of Finland the door with a 9-1 victory for a place in the Final Four of the $250,000 event at the Robinsons Place Mall in Ermita.
“We had a good start and that helped a lot,” Orcollo said in Filipino. “We hope to be able to play the same way against the Taiwanese because they’re a very tough team.”
Using the medium-hard break to great effect, the Orcollo-Gomez tandem was unrelenting, winning the first eight racks and getting at least 95 percent of the table time.
“We broke nicely and we were making almost every shot,” Gomez said in Filipino.
Immomen, the world No. 1, and Juva avoided the ignominy of a shutout in the ninth rack but an Immomen miss allowed the Filipinos to complete the most impressive charge to the Final Four.
The semifinals kick off at 1 p.m. Sunday, with the title match, which will be race-to-10, scheduled at 10 p.m.
Germany earlier moved within a victory of returning to the finals as Ralf Souquet and Oliver Ortmann squeezed out a 9-7 quarterfinal decision over Stephen Cohen and Francois Cottance of France.
The Germans were pushed to the limit for the first time in three matches and the former world 9-ball champion Souquet bailed the team out on a number of occasions as Ortmann struggled.
After giving up just a total of five racks in their first two matches, the Germans needed a miss by Cohen on the No. 4 ball to clean up the final rack and arrange a Final Four showdown with China.
“It was a tough one, we win as a team and lose as a team,” Souquet said.
“That was my worst match,” Ortmann, who replaced Thorsten Hohmann as Souquet’s partner, said. “I didn’t play that good and made a couple of mistakes. I’m just glad that I have a strong partner and that’s why we won.”
The eighth-seeded Chinese tandem of Fu Jianbo and Li Hewen booked a semifinal seat after an easy 9-3 victory over Muhammad Zulfikri and Ricky Yang of Indonesia.
Zulfikri-Yang, which took out the defending champion Philippines A squad of Efren ‘Bata’ Reyes and Francisco Bustamante, 8-6, Thursday, split the first six racks with the Chinese with Yang making a golden break in the fifth.
But the Chinese got going starting in the seventh frame and never looked back with Fu providing some pretty spectacular shots.
Taiwan’s in-form Ko Pin-yi and Chang Jung-lin, meanwhile, stopped Poland’s Radislaw Babica and Mariusz Skoneckzy, 9-5.
The Taiwanese sealed their country’s best stint in five years of the tournament. Their best-ever finish came two years ago when they lost in the quarterfinals.
Last night, the five racks that the Taiwanese gave up was one more than the combined four the rock-solid team yielded in their first two games.
They ripped Malaysia, 8-2, in the first round, and Japan’s Naoyuki Oi and Toru Korubayashi via the same score.
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