Battling Edinburgh book Twickenham final spot
Edinburgh University Ladies’ rugby head coach Claire Cruikshank has hailed her side’s fighting spirit after they reached the final of the BUCS Championship at Twickenham, writes Gary Heatly.
The capital side went into the semi-final with Durham University at Peffermill in fine form. They had already won the BUCS Premier North league this season and had their Scotland players back from the Six Nations.
Durham started strongly, but Edinburgh led 7-0 at the interval. The second half continued much the same way, with Durham putting phases together and Edinburgh unable to get into their stride. Durham pulled a try back, but this was quickly followed by Megan Gaffney re-establishing the lead for Edinburgh.
Durham then crossed to close the gap to two points before, in the closing six minutes, two tries from Lisa Thomson gave the Scots a 22-10 victory.
Cruikshank said: “The end result looks quite comfortable. However, the game was anything but that. Until the last six minutes, it really could have gone either way. Credit to the players for sticking to their task and battling through.”
In the final, Edinburgh will play the University of Northumbria on Thursday 30 March. Mark Selby recovered from a slow start to power into the second round of the China Open in Beijing yesterday.
The world No 1 struggled in the early stages against Adam Stefanow, going 2-0 down before getting on the board with a break of 61.
World champion Selby levelled the contest with a 136 and, although his Polish opponent regained the lead 0 Selby: Won from 2-0 down. by winning the fifth frame, knocks of 113 and 126 put Selby on the brink of victory and he wrapped up the victory with an 87.
Judd Trump had no problems as he started his title defence with a 5-0 whitewashing of Jason Weston.
Stuart Bingham and home favourite Ding Junhui were 5-3 victors against Scott Donaldson and Sean O’sullivan respectively, while Mark Williams brushed aside Zhang Anda 5-1. However, Joe Perry was an early casualty, going out 5-2 to Iran’s Hossein Vafaei, Robert Milkins lost 5-3 to Noppon Saengkham and Mark King exited 5-4 to Leeds potter Sanderson Lam.