The 2025 English Open – Day 3

Here is the report shared by WST about day 3 at the 2025 English Open

BetVictor English Open Day Three

Luca Brecel’s comeback gathered momentum as he beat Jimmy White 4-1 to reach the last 64 of the BetVictor English Open in Brentwood.

Brecel didn’t compete in the first three ranking events of the season then scored his first win of the campaign with a 4-0 success against Liam Davies in the BetVictor Northern Ireland Open qualifiers. And the 2023 World Champion built on that today with a comfortable win over White, making top breaks of 51, 50 and 95. He will meet Hossein Vafaei in round three on Monday evening.

Marco Fu’s superb form continued as he beat Mark Davis 4-0 with a top break of 110, his eighth win in ten matches so far this season. Iran’s Amir Sarkhosh top scored with 76 in a 4-2 defeat of Long Zehuang, earning a tie with Mark Williams.

Jimmy Robertson beat Wang Yuchen 4-3 on the final black, clearing the colours in the decider. Essex’s Zak Surety also took the decider on the colours to win 4-3, beating Haris Tahir. Liam Highfield came from 3-1 down to beat Oliver Lines 4-3, making 89 and 79 for 3-3 then winning the decider by clearing from yellow to pink. Louis Heathcote top scored with 127 in a 4-3 win over Jordan Brown.

All the results are available on snooker.org, even those from the late evening session that are missing from the above report.

I first watched the Fan Zengyi v Julien Leclercq match … 😞 Julien started well enough, winning the first two frames, but as soon as Fan won the third, I sensed that the “feel” of the match had changed and that Fan would win. Unfortunately¹, I was right. This is nothing against Fan, who is a very determined character and never gives up, but it is a concern about Julien who is hugely talented but appears to have lost his confidence, and, maybe, his motivation as well.

Next, I watched the Jimmy Robertson v Wang Yuchen match. This was a very hard fought and good quality match but not a “high scoring” type of match. Wang lost despite making the two highest breaks in the match: 92 and 53. The 53 came in the decider… Jimmy is a very skilled “hard match player” and he proved it again yesterday. All credits to him.

I’m also pleased that Sunny Akani progressed. I certainly have nothing against David Lilley as a person and I know that life hasn’t always been kind to him but I don’t enjoy watching him play. This match was extremely hard fought as you would expect with these two, and featured just one break over 50, a 55 by David in frame 4. Only two frames were “one-sided” scoring-wise, the first and the last, both won by Sunny.