Snooker: Dale Defeats Day in Season Opener

In a very successful season opener in China, Dominic Dale defeated Ryan Day by 10 frames to 6 to take the £48,000 first prize. Personally I didn't think Dale had it in him to get to the final, never mind win the event, but to my surprise, Dale played brilliantly to come back from 6-2 down.

With a new cue, his game looked very good and Dale looked very relaxed. In the 10th frame, Dale knocked in a very well constructed 143 to take the additional £2,000 high break prize.

The tournament as a whole turned out to be a great success despite the absence of the flawed genius Ronnie O'Sullivan. The matches were shown live on Eurosport and, unfortunately, because of the time difference between Europe and Shanghai, I missed the majority of the matches. Eurosport replayed the best matches in the evening but I tended to know the results already as I was following the matches at work though the BBC website! :-)

Still, great to see 2 unexpected finalists battling it out in a ranking event final and I'm looking forward to the next one!