‘The most simple shot imaginable!’ – Luca Brecel produces two scarcely believable misses at Northern Ireland Open

It is probably fair to say that Belgian snooker star Luca Brecel wasn’t firing on all cylinders during his Northern Ireland Open match against Pang Junxu on Thursday morning.

Having said that, he was looking in good nick as breaks of 111 and 74 saw him race into a 2-0 lead before Pang even got on the scoreboard, eventually moving one frame from victory with a 3-1 lead.

But that’s where things started to go a bit wrong.

In the fifth frame at 38-28 up, Brecel had a simple black off its spot, a routine shot for every professional player, and somehow deigned to miss it as you can see in the video at the top of the article.

Phil Yates on Eurosport commentary could scarcely believe what he was seeing.

“Oh but then he misses the black off the spot!” Yates exclaimed.

“That black could come back to haunt Luca Brecel let me tell you.”

And indeed it did come back to haunt Brecel with his opponent coming back to win the frame to reduce the deficit to just one.

But that frame wasn’t without more drama. Junxu couldn’t seal away the frame straight away so Brecel came back to the table.

At 51-42 he had a long, but straight red to the same pocket. I think you can probably see what’s coming next, as you can watch below.

“Oh! He was nowhere near was he?” said an increasingly disbelieving Yates.

“Wasn’t even in the same postcode!

“You will not see all week a pot missed by more than that.”

Thankfully for Brecel this bad luck didn’t cause him to lose the match, as he won a tense decider to triumph 4-3.

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