THE 2023 LONGONI 9 BALL LEAGUE reconvenes this Thursday 13th April in the picturesque Austrian Alpine town of St Johann im Pongau. Moving away from its customary Friday night spot due to the following Euro Tour event taking place over four days instead of the usual three, there are six matches taking place instead of the regular four. This is due to the two matches postponed from the opening day in Tallinn in February being rescheduled.
The format is scotch doubles with the matches a race to seven and the tournament comprises 12 national teams divided into groups of three. Each team plays the other once and the country which tops each table moves forward into the semi-finals. All competing players are selected on a match-by-match basis with the two highest-ranked players from each nation immediately preceding the round of matches taking part.
With two matches held over from Tallinn due to logistical airline issues affecting the players, there will be some different players representing teams competing on Thursday evening.
In Group C, Norway v Switzerland is the held-over match and will be between Mats Schjetne and Emil-Andre Gangflot (Norway) and Nicolas Ernst and Sandro Zuercher (Switzerland). These were the four highest-ranked available players when the matches were originally scheduled.
Group D sees Germany and the Netherlands playing catch-up with Tobias Bongers and Yuma Dorner representing Germany and Niels Feijen and Marc Bijsterbosch getting the nod for Holland. Again, both sets of players were the highest-ranked and available at the time of the postponement.
Once those two matches are completed, the evening reverts to its scheduled programme which sees Germany continue with a match against Hungary. Joshua Filler and Ralf Souquet will be the competing players for Germany due to them being ranked 5th and 8th respectively coming into the event. Hungary’s line-up will be Oliver Szolnoki and Atilla Bezdan.
Group C has the reappearance of Norway who this time, take on Bosnia & Herzegovina. Schjetne and Gangflot maintain their positions for Norway while BIH are represented by Ajdin Piknjac and EdinBanovic.
Estonia and the Czech Republic face off in Group B as young Karl Gnadeberg and Nils Luhavee represent Estonia while the Czechs have Roman Hybler and Petr Urban. Finally, Group A sees defending champions Poland (Wiktor Zielinski and Wojciech Szewczyk) go up against Mario He and Jonas Kornmesser in what promises to be the pick of the evening’s matches.
The third round of matches are scheduled for Friday 26th May in Tampere, Finland.
All matches and groups are contained within the attached graphics and all matches can be viewed at https://www.reelive.de/stream-
Live scoring can be found at www.epbf.com
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