NEIL Wood, the defending champion and five-times winner, is in the final of York Conservative clubs' Tayrol Scruton Cup individual snooker competition for the sixth time in seven years.

He beat his Heworth club colleague Kevin Gall 2-0 in the semi-finals and in the final he will play another Heworth player Clive Whyte, who made breaks of 26, 28, 39 and 57 in defeating Colin Robinson (Bootham) 2-0 in the other semi-final.

The final will be played at Heworth club on Monday, April 4, and will be the best of five frames.

Wood and Whyte will also contest the final of the Foster's Challenge knockout competition to be played at Heworth club on Monday, March 21. Whyte is the defending champion and both players have won the title once in the three years of the event.

After losing the first frame of his semi-final, Wood rallied to beat Ken Taylor (Bootham) 2-1. Whyte defeated Jeff Brown (Fulford) in the other semi-final. The final will be the best of five frames.

Bootham held on to the number one spot in York Conservative clubs' Slater Cup Snooker Pairs League despite going down 4-3 to Acomb.

Bootham won three of the first four games and looked odds-on winners as they moved 39 points ahead in the aggregate scores.

However, Dave Chapman and Mike Franks won the fifth game by a resounding 52 points to overturn the deficit and then Sam Bowker and Keith Dalby took the last frame by 77-39 to earn Acomb an unlikely 4-3 victory.

Second-placed Acomb trail Bootham by two points with two matches left to play.

Heworth thrashed Fulford 6-1 to move five points behind Acomb.

They looked to be on the way to a whitewash, but B Smith and M Chapman fluked the last pink to enable them to get a black ball win in the last game.

However, Heworth easily gained the aggregate point for a 6-1 success.

Updated: 09:03 Saturday, March 05, 2005