World No. 1 Rory McIlroy was due to return to TPC Harding Park at the crack of dawn yesterday to fight for a place in the semi-finals of the WCG Match Play after darkness halted his match with England’s Paul Casey on Saturday.
The pair were deadlocked through 21 holes before bad light made it impossible to continue.
McIlroy, who squared the match on the 17th hole when Casey made bogey, could have ended it from 11 feet on the 18th and again from six feet on the 21st, but his last putt caught the edge and lipped out.
“I dodged a couple of bullets,” Casey said. “I’m glad we’re teeing off tomorrow, simple as that. I was standing here on this green, I thought I was done for the day and done for the week, but the beautiful thing is we get to hit the reset button tomorrow at 6:45am and start again.”
McIlroy, who was hoping to make the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas, was resigned to continuing his own fight in the early hours of the morning.
“I think we were both struggling to read our putts there,” McIlroy said of the dark conditions. “We wanted to try and get finished, but we’ll come back tomorrow morning and do it all over again. It was back and forth. I thought the match was pretty good. I made a couple key up-and-downs when I needed to coming down the stretch and had a couple of opportunities to close it out, one at 18 and one there, but couldn’t quite convert.”
World No. 5 Jim Furyk awaits the winner after booking his place with an impressive back nine against former Open winner Louis Oosthuizen of South Africa.
One hole down through nine, Furyk rallied to make the final four for the first time in his 15 attempts, going one better than his quarter-final loss last year.
The other semi-final was to be between big-hitting Gary Woodland of the US and England’s Danny Willett.
Woodland beat John Senden 5 and 3 after birdies on four of the opening five holes saw him go 4-up, a lead from which the Australian could not recover.
Willett beat fellow Englishman Tommy Fleetwood 4 and 3 to make the final four on his debut at the event.
Earlier on Saturday, McIlroy had routed Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama 6 and 5 to advance to the quarter-finals.
In other round-of-16 action, Oosthuizen beat Rickie Fowler, while Furyk took out fellow countryman J.B. Holmes 5 and 3.
Willett upset Lee Westwood 3 and 2, while Fleetwood won 2 and 1 against South Africa’s Branden Grace.
Senden took down 2012 champion and 2013 runner-up Hunter Mahan 2 and 1.
Woodland had beaten Australian Marc Leishman 2 and 1 to advance.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier