Chinese dish out pool beating, rip jittery Pinoys
MANILA, Philippines—Failing to make difficult shots and turning safety plays into opportunities for its foes, a nervous Philippine B squad of Dennis Orcollo and Roberto Gomez picked the absolute worst time to play in shambles.
China’s Fu Jianbo and Li Hewen settled down when they had to and dealt Orcollo and Gomez a humiliating 10-5 beating Sunday to bag their second World Cup of Pool title at the Robinsons Place Mall in Ermita.
With the Filipinos playing like nervous wrecks, the Chinese downed rack after rack from 1-all to take a 9-1 lead that had the hometown fans shell-shocked and silenced.
Fu was the stabilizing presence for the Chinese as the reedy veteran made crucial shots time and again, including the final stroke on the 9 with the crowd hollering at him to miss.
Gomez typified the jitters that wrecked the RP campaign in the finals when he muffed what looked like an easy attempt on the 9-ball which would have given the hosts a 2-1 lead applied pressure on the Chinese.
The grievious miss recalled a similar shot Gomez blew against eventual winner Daryl Peach of Britain in the 2007 World 9-ball finals in Manila.
“The Chinese started strong and we weren’t able to recover anymore,” said Gomez later in Filipino. “That’s how it is in billiards. Maybe the title wasn’t really meant for us.”
It was a bitter pill to swallow for the Philippines after its second team in the tournament had looked so confident of retrieving the title given up by Efren (Bata) Reyes and Francisco (Django) Bustamante in the second round with a come-from-behind 9-8 win over Taiwan’s Chang Jun-lin and Ko Pin-yi in the semifinals.
The Chinese had reached the finals first with a similar scrambling 9-7 victory over Germany’s Ralf Souquet and Oliver Ortmann.
Fu and Li, who first won in 2007 and became just the second team after Reyes and Bustamante to win this event for the second time, split the $60,000 top prize.
Orcollo and Gomez settled for the $30,000 runner-up purse.
With the Chinese beyond recall, the Filipino pair staged a mini-rally by winning four straight racks to make it 9-5 only for Gomez to make a truly questionable decision in the 15th rack, when after a bad safety play by Li, he elected to play safe instead of sinking the yellow 1.
After an exchange of safeties, the Chinese then won out again as Orcollo was forced to go for the 1 with a jumpshot over the 8 that left the table open for the Chinese.
In the exciting Final Four earlier, Orcollo-Gomez trailed, 3-5, before staging a comeback to take the lead at 7-6 following consecutive runouts.
It was anybody’s game from there until Chang blew a shot on No. 2 in the 17th rack to pave the way for cleanup by Orcollo and Gomez.
“I almost lost my mind there,” Orcollo told table-side reporter John McDonald after the wild, wild semifinal match. “All of my body was shaking and the Lord helped us.”
The Chinese made the title match despite blowing cold in a crucial stretch of their Final Four clash with the Germans.
China won six of the first seven frames before sitting out the next six to yield a 6-7 lead before coming up with a huge finishing kick that bundled out last year’s losing finalists.
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