English trio make final while Rollinson and Bent-Ashmeil enjoy Games experience

After a shaky start for defending champion Jack Laugher, all Team England divers progressed through to the Men’s 3m Springboard final on day three of diving action.

Laugher had a somewhat unsteady display in this morning’s preliminary round after starting with a failed dive.

The 27-year-old performed a different dive in round one to what he had on his dive list, resulting in a score of zero and leaving him at the bottom of the leaderboard.

He was able to recover and sneak into the qualification spots with a total of 350.90 to finish eleventh. Only the top 12 progressed to the final.

The 2018 gold medallist in this event will be looking to add to his tally so far in Birmingham as he looks to make it a hat-trick of golds on home turf.

Laugher’s teammates Dan Goodfellow and Jordan Houlden secured their places with consistent displays which saw them finish in third and fifth respectively.

Goodfellow racked up a strong total of 430.05 points while Houlden, who achieved the highest stand-alone score out of the English trio, finished with 414.35.

Houlden scored an impressive 82.80 in the penultimate round for his Back 3½ Somersaults in tuck.

Goodfellow described his performance as ‘steady’, saying: “It was alright.

“A lot of people have competed already, this is my first event so I think it’s just about going out there and getting used to things.

“Not doing anything crazy or any drastic mistakes and just absorbing all of it, especially with the home crowd and stuff like that.

“It was just about getting used to it. But yeah, it was steady, there’s loads to improve on.

“I feel good, I’ve been diving well this week. Dived quite good in the prelims so I hope that can carry over to the final, sharpen some things up and it’d be great to come away with a medal.”

Rollinson and Bent-Ashmeil take fourth

The young Team England partnership of Amy Rollinson and Desharne Bent-Ashmeil competed in the Women’s Synchronised 3m Springboard final.

They were the youngest pairing, with Rollinson aged 18 and Bent-Ashmeil just 17 years of age.

Rollinson has secured one medal already after winning bronze in the Women’s 1m Springboard.

The duo scored a total of 278.10 and described it as a ‘good experience’.

Rollinson said: “I think it went quite well, we’ve not had huge amount of preparation for it so just to have got our dives down. I think we’re both just happy with how we played it all out.

“We both know we can do better but, a huge crowd, giving everything, I think we both did quite well considering everything.

“It was funny, on our first dive everybody cheered and Desharne turned round to me and went ‘oh my God, it’s so loud’. It’s so cool having everybody there.

“I definitely found that yesterday helped. Even today I just found it helped that everybody was there trying to get you to do well.”

Bent-Ashmeil added: “I enjoyed it quite a lot. This is my first Commonwealth Games and this is my first event.

“I have tomorrow and Monday, so I feel like it was a good experience and a good way to get me used to the crowd.

“On the first dive I didn’t know it was going to be that loud because when you’re in the crowd you can’t really hear it as much as when you’re the person they’re cheering for.

“I’ve definitely not experienced anything like that before. Usually we have our parents there but because of Covid, this was my first really big crowd, so I felt like it was a good experience.”

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