The finalists in the last two Gold Cups booked a meeting in the last four of the tournament after strong winds and rain on Hamilton Harbour produced a dramatic day of controversy, accidents and errors in yesterday's quarter-finals.

Reigning champion Peter Gilmour will face four-time title holder Russell Coutts over five races after their respective wins over John Cutler and Gavin Brady.

The US Virgin Islands' Peter Holmberg, who beat Germany's Markus Wieser, will face unseeded New Zealander Murray Jones, conqueror of world number two Chris Law, in the other semi-final.

All but Gilmour's encounter went to a decisive race yesterday as the gusty conditions had boats rolling at all angles.

But the Australian's opponent, New Zealand's John Cutler, had only himself to blame for not producing a closer result than the eventual 3-0 outcome.

Cutler inexplicably set off on an extra leg, failing to cross the finishing line to claim a victory in their third flight when Gilmour was at his mercy after ripping his spinnaker and incurring two penalties.

That would have tied the match at 1-1 after no score had been recorded in their first flight because the pair had been involved in two collisions and been forced to retire.

Amazingly, Jones had made an almost identical mistake in his first race against Chris Law to allow the Briton to take an early lead.

Jones had been leading and Law still had a penalty turn to take but the Kiwi lost track of the number of legs he had sailed and rounded the downwind mark instead of finishing.

Law might have been grateful for the let-off but himself became embroiled in the controversy caused by Gilmour's torn spinnaker, which shredded across his boat.

The second seed, who has never won the Gold Cup, said afterwards: "The question is, did that cost us the match? The answer? Probably.

"Basically what happened is that we came off the line having won the start in our match against Murray.

"The pair ahead of us -- Peter and John -- were actually going by us and if we'd continued on starboard we'd have hit them. So we tacked first and they then went into a gybe without looking and gybed all over the top of us.

"We had to bear away, reach under them, they destroyed their spinnaker and caused serious damage. We then lost that match by four or five seconds.

"We red-flagged it and found out that even though there was serious damage, it wasn't in our match and there was nothing we could do about it under the rules.'' Law bounced back to level in the fourth flight but Jones, tactician on his country's victorious 1995 America's Cup team, held on to qualify for the semi-finals for the second year in a row.

Law, acknowledging his opponent's abilities, continued: "To be honest I didn't think we ever felt we held the advantage. If anything, Murray did. I thought he sailed the boat very well today.

"I think I probably let my guys down. They handled the boat well. There were a couple of instances where I made the wrong decision, particularly in the last race.

"We had a very tight start and were tacking bow to bow together and then a big puff came down and almost self-tacked us. We took it and hit some seas.

Murray, meanwhile, had come back at us. We tacked under him, we were slower and he rolled us and that was the race right there.'' Jones, referring to his miscalculation in the first flight that would have made the final race unnecessary, said: "We were sure we had only done two laps. We made the mistake of not looking around at the other boats and seeing that they had finished.

"That was pretty expensive for us at the time, but fortunately we came back to win the last race.'' There was further misfortune for fellow New Zealander Brady in his match with compatriot Coutts -- and shades of deja vu.

Last year at the same stage Brady was defeated in the decider with Coutts when his mainsheet broke.

This time -- after fighting back from a 2-0 deficit to level at 2-2 -- it was his forestay.

"We heard a pretty loud bang at the start -- it sounded like the start gun actually,'' he said. "We didn't really know what it was and we decided to keep on sailing. Nothing seemed to be too wrong with the boat although we knew we had broken something. We did the first lap and the race was pretty close.

Then going up the second leg, the forestay seemed to have wriggled loose and the rig was popping around.

"We had to make a decision there whether we were going to continue or pull out.

"We decided to give it one more run, but we turned the last corner and thought for the good of the boat the right thing to do was to pull out.'' He added: "It's shades of last year. But we don't get to race Russell too much, so that's good for us. We know we can go toe-to-toe with him although we seemed to struggle early on so maybe we just need to get a bit more consistent.'' However, there was some good news for Brady after it was confirmed that he had joined Dawn Riley's America's Cup syndicate America True on which Cutler is the designated helmsman.