Italy cruise to a convincing Day One victory. Mixed fortunes for England.

Italy have set the pace with a brilliant 12-point team score after the first day of the World Championship fished on Slovenia’s beautiful River Sava. The talented line-up had section winners in the shape of Andrea Fini and Jacopo Falsini, plus a 2nd and two 4ths in their 19-peg zones.

The chasing pack are not too far behind, however, with the Czech Republic, Spain and Poland all on 19 points and Hungary, who had three section winners, on 19.5 points.

England have had mixed fortunes. On the team front, they have posted 33 points for 9th place out of the 37 teams. This will make it difficult but not impossible to come back with a medal. On the individual side, though, Alan Scotthorne could possibly be poised to do the unthinkable and win a 6th gold medal as he won his section from peg A1 with 9kg and has drawn the highly fancied D Section tomorrow.

Will Raison has also done exceptionally well. Bank runners had him down as 4th or 5th in section behind Andrea Fini’s 12.6kg, but he surprised everyone to weigh 12.3kg for a well-earned 2nd in section and becomes another individual medal prospect. His weight was certainly not helped by a very unfortunate Romanian the next peg upstream who played a huge 8kg+ carp for an hour and three quarters before losing the massive fish. He had 13m of pole in the air with an 8m deep rig and the same amount of hollow elastic out and broke four top kits trying to net the fish, as he somehow tried to swap the rig over to a new top kit each time one snapped! He was doubly unlucky as he only had an hour to set up after finding out he and his teammate were mistakenly sat on each other’s pegs! After losing the fish he then fed his pole swim very heavily and, although not intentional, the whole episode must surely have cost Will valuable fish.

The rest of the team found the going tough. Callum Dicks had a good start with vimba on the long pole and caught plenty of bleak on the whip in the hard latter stages but was plagued by a snaggy swim where he lost at least 15 hooklengths. Several anglers all in a row caught quality fish and despite beating several anglers either side he had to make do with 12th in C Section.

Des Shipp also found himself sat off the better fish in E Section and was forced to target bleak at the halfway stage but could only come back with 10 points. Sean Ashby fared a little better with 8 points from a difficult B Section after catching small fish on the long pole and whip.

Elsewhere, Serbia looked very dangerous all day in the first three sections but a poor result in D Section cost them dearly. Reigning champ Goran Radovic put on a great bleak catching display for 3rd in C Section while his teammates in A and B Sections worked a finely tuned ‘short-shipping’ line targeting everything that swims on the bottom, around 8m out.

The Polish anglers also looked impressive using 4m whips and small balls of hard and soft groundbait, fishing full depth with heavy pencil floats to catch better bleak and small vimba.

A few carassio were caught on the slider and Wales’ Lee Edwards had these to thank in his section-winning catch from B Section.

C Section didn’t fish as well as people hoped but still threw up some impressive weights topped by a 17.154kg bag of barbel and vimba by Russia’s Yury Siptsov from peg 27. That weight was only bettered by Hungary’s Attila Erdei who had 17.296kg from E24. His team mate Tamas Walter and Szilard Szilvasi are also on section wins. Tamas is a former individual champ and will surely be eyeing up another individual gold if he can.

Ireland’s Nick Howell also won his section with 84 fish for 14.957kg and the Czech Republic’s Ondrej Pokorny completes the list of 10 anglers on maximum points.

Conditions are expected to be the same tomorrow and with some areas fishing much harder than expected we believe targeting large numbers of smaller fish could play an even more important role for the top teams who are all especially honed at bleak fishing techniques.

Day One Result

• 1st Italy, 12 points
• 2nd Czech Republic, 19
• 3rd Spain, 19
• 4th Poland, 19
• 5th Hungary, 19.5
• 6th Slovakia, 26
• 7th Netherlands, 31
• 8th Serbia, 32
• 9th England, 33
• 10th Wales, 34