Day 2 of the World Championships

Table soccer - Multitables - ITSF World Cup Nantes 2012 - Nantes (FRA)

Day 2 of the World Championships

Posted by Jonny Müller on January 7, 2012

© Kozoom Multimedia
Collignon closing tha fifth match

The second day of the ITSF World Championship series was dedicated to doubles. In the men final it came to a showdown between the winners of 2009, Robert Atha and Joe Hamilton against the favorites, Frédéric Collignon and Tom van de Cauter. Although Frédéric Collignon is widely accepted as the best player in the world, especially on a multitable event, he has never won the doubles discipline in Nantes so far. So there might have been a little bit of extra pressure on him during this match.

Nevertheless, the Belgian team started off strong by winning the first two games, with van de Cauter bricking the snake shot of Rob Atha in an otherwise very even matchup. It looked like it was going to be a short final. However, Rob found out how to score in the third game and the Brits managed a huge comeback, evening the score at 2:2 in games. But Frédéric Collignon wouldn’t be Frédéric Collignon if he wouldn’t be able to step it up a notch. With a 4:1 lead in the the teams changed from Fireball to Leonhart, the hometable of the Belgians, where everyone expected the match to end. But again the Brits fought back, scoring both points on their opponents home-ground. They only needed one more block and one more goal against the great Belgian. The croud was cheering for the British team by then. And Joe Hamilton, who tried several defenses during the course of the match, got the block. Unfortunately, the ball came back to Collignon who wouldn’t let a second chance go by. With 5:3 in the fifth game, they won the World Championships title.

In the women discipline, the strong Danish team of Camilla Lohmann and Amalie Bremer made it to the finals with losing only one game. Their opponents in the finals, Agnieszka Rutowska Agnieszka and Agata Cwiakala from Poland had to put up more effort to get that far. With two very different tables, the Garlando and the Bonzini, the final is promising to be a good one. Don’t miss it today at 3 pm on the Kozoom live-stream.