Sheffield: Pankaj Advani and Aditya Mehta lost their respective matches at the Bluebell Wood Open on Saturday and with that they moved out of the third European Players Tour Championship (PTC) of the season at the Doncaster Dome in Sheffield. This untimely exit of Advani and Mehta came after their dismal show of 0-4 against Mark Williams and John Higgins, respectively.
Mehta did show some skills but that wasn’t enough as he lacked uniformity to make that much needed comeback and lost to four-time World Champion John Higgins of Scotland in the second round of the championship. Meanwhile, two-time World Champion Williams managed to put a halt to the dream-run of Advani in this pre-quarterfinal tie.
Williams started off brilliantly and took a 1-0 lead with the help of a 68 break. Advani did had a hope of making a comeback into the game during the third frame but a kick on the cueball followed by an in-off on the final green ruined his chances of return and Williams won the game without much of a resistance from Indian.
Meanwhile, Mehta started on a positive note in the opening frame as he made a break of 36 but Higgins countered him well with as he managed to get a break of 36 and 28 which gave him a nice head start.
As the match went into the second frame, Higgins was the show-stealer with a classy break of 70 which threw Mehta out of the competition and won it convincingly by 75-12. Mehta gave Higgins a tough fight in the third frame but somehow his counterpart managed to sneak through and won it by 68-64.
The fourth frame was more of a flashback of the whole match as Scotsman didn’t offer any opportunity to Aditya to settle down and fired in a break of 64 to downright the Indian 4-0.
Advani and Aditya now head to Germany to participate in the Paul Hunter Classic from August 23 to 25. It is a three-day knockout tournament wherein one half of the draw plays three rounds in a day to reach the pre-quarters. The other half plays on Day 2.
The round of 16 till the final are on the third day.