Snooker ace Stephen Maguire marched into the quarter-finals of the Welsh Open – but labelled his performance “embarrassing.”
The Glasgow potter continued his impressive form in Llandudno with victory over Lam, who had defeated UK Championship finalist Barry Hawkins in the first round, but was far from happy with his own performance – during a scrappy game of snooker littered with mistakes from both players. When asked for his take on the performance, Maguire said: “It was terrible. For a player of my standard, that needs to be better. I’ll phone wee (John) Higgins and see if he wants to go for a meal, get a bit of a pep talk. But I’m into the quarter-finals, great. It was embarrassing, I was terrible and I probably deserved to lose the match.”
Maguire was then asked if the Welsh Open was a special venue for him given his previous success, but remained typically brutal. He continued: “It’s been a good tournament for me over the years. Not great because I’ve only won it once and been in the final once but for a player of my standard that is obviously good.”
His post-match on Eurosport followed a similar tone, as he said: “Not very good, it was a bad performance and I got away with one there. There are not really any positives to take, some of the balls I missed meant I just didn’t feel great. And I found that one tough. I’ll need to sit down with you and you can tell me the positives on the table. I’m enjoying it off the table, I’m enjoying going on walks and stuff but on the table I’m just not there yet.”
Eurosport pundit Neal Foulds commented: “He’s always his most fierce critic. I hope he doesn’t think about the bad points too much because he’s playing nicely. But he’s one of these guys who doesn’t want to win a match like that. Whereas other players will be quite happy to be through. If he can regroup it would be very refreshing to see him win something again.”