We’ve already had three hectic days of action in the English Open tournament up at Event City in Manchester but arguably the craziest day of them all is yet to come. In fact it comes on Thursday when the 32 men left in the tournament face the prospect of two matches in a day as the competition plays down to the quarter final stage.
Time restrictions will stop us from looking at the last 16 of the event which takes place in the evening session on Thursday but we can look at the last 32 and that is what we will do here.
Early Matches
The first sets of matches sees Neil Robertson and Ronnie O’Sullivan back on the main tables. Robertson faces a tricky test in the Chinese star Xiao Guodong while O’Sullivan faces the easier test on paper of Chris Wakelin.
On the other tables there are six matches. Liam Highfield meets Ryan Day after his excellent win over Mark Selby on Wednesday. Barry Hawkins plays David Grace while Ricky Walden takes on Kritsanut Lertsattayathorn. Mark Allen plays Yan Bingtao while Stuart Carrington and Anthony Hamilton can do their ranking no harm by beating the other. Ding Junhui plays Jak Jones to complete the session.
Middle Matches
We have six middle session matches with Martin Gould against Judd Trump easily the pick of them. Not surprisingly that is on the main table. Stuart Bingham plays Dave Gilbert on the other TV table.
Elsewhere Liang Wenbo meets Fergal O’Brien, Tom Ford plays Joe Swail, Ali Carter takes on Ben Woollaston and Kyren Wilson plays Rhys Clark who is in the middle of a decent couple of weeks and will hope that continues here.
Later Matches
Two matches have been saved to make it three matches on the TV tables in the afternoon. They see John Higgins facing Fraser Patrick in an all-Scottish clash with Mark Williams meeting Ian Preece on the other table.
Betting
This isn’t the easiest session to bet on as there are a lot of fairly solid favourites and having not seen everyone in the tournament and some players having less hectic routes through the others it can be difficult to match them all up but I’ve found two bets I like which are both handicaps.
Ryan Day looked very good in his win over Stephen Maguire in what was a high quality match on the main table on Wednesday and I think he comes past Liam Highfield with a bit to spare. Highfield has a couple of issues to overcome for me. The first of them is he has to get back up for this match less than 24hrs after the biggest win of his career on Wednesday while we should also recognise he didn’t play that well against Selby he just caught the world champion on very much the right day.
On what we’ve seen from Day this week it would be something of a shock to me if he doesn’t come through there with more than a little bit to spare.
The other match is Liang Wenbo to come through against Fergal O’Brien with a bit in hand. Wenbo has been excellent in this tournament so far whereas O’Brien has battled his way through as he so often does. History is on the side of the Chinese player. He has won their last three best of seven matches 4-0. This might not be that comfortable but I do think he’ll win it no worse than 4-2.
Tips
WON – Back R.Day (-1.5 frames) to beat L.Highfield for a 4/10 stake at 1.85 with Coral
WON – Back L.Wenbo (-1.5 frames) to beat F.O’Brien for a 4/10 stake at 1.87 with Coral
Back them here:
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