Nutcharut and Bai to Contest World Championship Final
Mink Nutcharut will meet Bai Yulu in the final of the 2024 World Women’s Snooker Championship after the pair won their semi-final matches on Saturday at the Changping Gymnasium, Dongguan, China.
World number one Nutcharut will contest the title match for the third time in her career and will be looking to lift the Mandy Fisher Trophy for the second time after she stormed to a 5-0 whitewash of Ng On Yee this evening.
The 2022 winner is yet to drop a frame in this year’s event and claimed a surprisingly one-sided encounter against three-time winner Ng to also guarantee that she will remain world number one following the conclusion of this year’s event.
With Nutcharut having comfortably eased into a 2-0 lead, the crucial frame would prove to be the third as with Ng ahead and favourite to reduce her arrears, a classy break of 40 turned the tide in her favour as she took the frame on the black to move further clear. Ng continued to fight, but Nutcharut proved strong and would maintain her perfect record in the tournament.
Earlier in the day, China’s Bai Yulu completed a successful comeback from 3-0 down to defeat England’s Reanne Evans 5-3 for the second successive year in the World Championship semi-finals.
It was 12-time champion Evans who flew out of the traps with breaks of 30, 68 and 76 to lead 3-0, before Bai claimed a crucial fourth ahead of the mid-session interval to gain a foothold in the contest.
The decisive frame would ultimately prove to be the sixth, however, as with Evans having potted a respotted black to seemingly take a 4-2 lead, she could only watch on as the cueball dropped into the middle pocket and the scores were level at 3-3.
From this point it was Bai who would not be stopped and added breaks of 38 and 71 to clinch a dramatic victory and secure her place in the final for the second successive year. Having lost out to Thailand’s Baipat Siripaporn in 2023, the 20-year-old will be looking to go one step further and claim the title and a place on the World Snooker Tour for the first time in her career.
The best of 11 frames final will begin at 12pm CST, with the pair set to clash for the third time this season with Bai having won 3-2 in the quarter-finals of the UK Championship and Mink having triumphed 4-3 in the Albanian Open semi-finals last month.
