Institute duo at World Snooker Championships

New Institute Club members Brendan O’Donoghue and Mark Gleeson are in Qatar in recent days to compete in the World Amateur Snooker Championships.

Puckane native Gleeson travelled over early last week as he had to play in the qualifying stages in order to play in the main draw. Unfortunately, he came up against very strong opposition, including a a past amateur world champion and ex-professional.

In his opponents first visit to the table, Mark was greeted to the world stage with a 126 break and the standard didn't fall too far from there. Mark pushed back and narrowly lost out in close frames falling short of qualifying.

The club, town, county, and Irish snooker family are very proud of Mark after his first appearance in this tournament, and

Multi-Irish number one Brendan O’Donoghue, from Nenagh, started his tournament off with an epic comeback win on Saturday.

He fell behind by three frames to one in a best of seven frame match against Mohd Reza Hasson of Malaysia. However, nerves were held and with no surprise he won three frames in a row to take the win.

Later in the day, Brendan played his second group game coming through a 4-2 victor over Bashar Abdulmajeed of Qatar. Then on Sunday, playing his third and last group game Brendan won 4-1 in a very impressive manner against second sees Steve Mifsud of Australia, to top his group and progress straight to the last sixteen.

Unfortunately, he came up against one of the favourites for the tournament in Xiaolong Liang from China who was unstoppable and beat Brendan four frames to one.

We have no doubt both Brendan and Mark will be back on the world stage next year.

Intermediate: Also at the weekend, Noel Gleeson won the second Intermediate ranking event of the season in Celbridge Snooker Club on Sunday. He played excellent snooker all weekend just dropping one frame in the entire competition, on his way to beating Andrew Doherty from Dublin 30 in the final.