World number 52 Scott Donaldson gained one of the best victories of his career as he beat eighth seed Mark Allen in a late-night finish on day three of the UK Championship.<\/b><\/p>\n
Donaldson, whose father Hector died aged 70 on 2 October, was in tears as he walked to the arena before the match as the song he chose, Babylon by David Gray, was one of his dad’s favourites.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old Scot had caused a big shock as he fought back from 5-0 down to defeat former world champion Stuart Bingham 6-5 in the final qualifying round and Donaldson maintained that form at York Barbican.<\/p>\n
He led former world number one Allen 3-0, with the Northern Irishman, who won this tournament in 2022, pulling one back before the mid-session interval.<\/p>\n
But in a match full of long, tough frames, one of which lasted an hour with another around the 50-minute mark, Donaldson managed to keep nudging closer to victory, before sealing a 6-1 success.<\/p>\n
There was drama too on table two as, for the first time in this year’s tournament, a deciding frame was needed with China’s Zhang Anda scraping a 6-5 win over England’s Gary Wilson.<\/p>\n
Zhang now plays reigning China’s world champion Zhao Xintong after he gained a 6-1 victory over compatriot Long Zehuang in Monday’s afternoon session.<\/p>\n
More to follow.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number 52 Scott Donaldson gained one of the best victories of his career as he beat eighth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-606283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115647106511679077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}