3-Cushion
LOMMEL - With only one day to go in the preliminaries of the Cuvino Superprestige, Roland Forthomme leads the provisional ranking of twelve players. Four players, Frédéric Caudron, Jef Philipoom, Frédéric Mottet and Luc Salvo will be called to the table by speaker and entertainer Bennie van Goethem in tonight's session.
Three days of billiards in Adelberg, where a full house is enjoying high three cushion level, have showed how small the differences were between the Belgian top players. For instance: Eddy Leppens needed a little run up (draw against Steven Acker) on Friday to grow to a better form; at the end of the evening he showed up with the best average of twelve players so far (1.518).
The high runs were rarely seen on the beautiful, ultra-fast Verhoeven tables: Roland Forthomme and Peter Ceulemans ran a 'nine', Eddy Merckx, Francis Forton and Martin Spoormans made runs of eight.
Roland Forthomme and Eddy Merckx played averages not so far from 1.500, respectively 1.481 and 1.478. Twice we could see a 2.000 average match: Eddy Leppens last night against Peter Ceulemans, Peter De Backer on the first day versus Eddy Merckx.
Tonight (Friday) a few big names enter the room to compete in the last qualifying round. Frédéric Caudron, Jef Philipoom and Frédéric Mottet are three contenders for two spots. Luc Salvo is the outsider in that company.
The ranking so far with one round to go, leading to the matches for the quarter-finals (Saturday at 11:00):
1 Roland Forthomme 6-1.481-9
2 Peter De Backer 6-1.318-6
3 Eddy Leppens 5-1.518-7
4 Eddy Merckx 4-1.478-8
5 Martin Spoormans 4-1.200-8
6 Peter Ceulemans 3-1.000-9
7 Davy van Havere 2-1.255-6
8 Francis Forton 2-1.253-8
9 Steven Acker 2-1.096-7
10 Kurt Ceulemans 2-0.928-6
11 Henk Blauwblomme 0-1.000-7
12 Ronny Daniels 0-0.817-6.