Luke Littler’s World Matchplay title defence continued with a straightforward 16-7 quarter-final win over Josh Rock in Blackpool.<\/p>\n
Rock initially kept pace with the world number one as the players traded breaks to reach 5-5.<\/p>\n
But after 19-year-old Littler reeled off five legs in a row, there proved to be no way back for Rock as the defending champion, in dazzling form, cruised into the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
After throwing 17 180s with a scoring average of 109.57, Littler said: “At the minute, everything’s going to plan.”<\/p>\n
The teenager added: “I feel good. I can afford to miss a few doubles because the scoring’s there.<\/p>\n
“Once again another brilliant performance, but fair play to Josh, he put up a good fight.”<\/p>\n
Littler will play unseeded Dirk van Duijvenbode of the Netherlands in Saturday’s semi-final.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Thursday evening, tournament outsider Van Duijvenbode survived a late surge by Gary Anderson to reach his first Matchplay semi-final.<\/p>\n
Anderson, the 2018 World Matchplay champion, threatened to close an eight-leg deficit with a fine late display including a 154 checkout, but Van Duijvenbode held on for a 16-13 win.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on his second-round tie-break win over Michael van Gerwen, Van Duijvenbode had said that shaking “like a little child crying for his mum” allowed his compatriot back into match after leading 8-4.<\/p>\n
After leading 8-4 again on Thursday, Van Duijvenbode dropped two consecutive legs but then stormed into a 14-6 lead by winning the next six without reply.<\/p>\n
However, it would be a further nine legs until Van Duijvenbode won the tie as a resurgent Anderson pushed him hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luke Littler’s World Matchplay title defence continued with a straightforward 16-7 quarter-final win over Josh Rock in Blackpool.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-541157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}