Cippenham Super 6 Senior 2-Star Open Championships (27.2.11)
Neil Wright made it three victories in a row in Cippenham’s open tournaments on Sunday. This time it was the Super 6 Senior 2-Star Open title that he added to the Five by Two Senior 1-Star title from January and the Team 2-Star Open from last November. We are used, at Cippenham, to our titles flying back down the M4 into Wales and this time the runners-up award went the same direction as Wright’s victim in the final was his Welsh compatriot Dean Cundy.
The final was won by Wright 3-1, unlike the two previous rounds that both went the full distance. In the semi-final Wright put paid to the chances of Jojo Senorin while one round earlier it was Antony Patten who at one time led Wright by two games to one. In the last 16 Wright beat Simon Dilkes 3-1 in another very close encounter.
Cundy’s quarter-final was a relatively straight-forward event, beating Radovan Zivkovic impressively 3-0 but his was the only one. All the other quarters went the distance as, apart from Wright’s win over Patten, Senorin beat Martin Gunn 11-9 in the fifth and top seed Hari Gehlot came from 2-1 down to defeat Cippenham’s Kevin Gray. In their semi-final Cundy then scored an excellent 3-1 win over Gehlot.
Neil Wright did not, however, go through the event unbeaten. In fact, he lost his very first match in the preliminary round group to the nationally unranked Luis Matos. Wright went on to beat Liam McTiernan to still win the group on a tie-break while Matos found his way only into the consolation event where he lost in the semi-final to Klaudia Szadkowska.
The Women’s Singles was run as a round-robin of five players due to one absence and was won by Klaudia Szadkowska with Julie Furber runner-up. All the matches were won 3-0 except for the very close 13-11 fifth-game win for Furber over Ikue Humphrey.
As is commonplace at Cippenham, the women were invited into the consolation event and, as is also commonplace, did very well. Szadkowska made it two wins in as many events as she eclipsed Ed Slot in the final. Slot had beaten tournament organiser Paul Baker 11-9 in one semi-final while Szadkowska romped through the event 3-0 apart from her 3-1 win over Matos in her semi.
The tournament attracted a maximum 48 contestants and, in the Men’s Singles, Referee Steve Smith managed to replace all the no-shows resulting in a great day’s table tennis for everyone with six players in each group with all players going into the knock-out stages.
By Graham Trimming