The 46-year-old, who has received the title on seven occasions, stated it is great to see Ding play well. He is a class act. Afterward, I just said to him, You played great, go and win and get the job done. I think we are all Ding fans.
Some days you play, and it goes great days, it doesn’t. It was just one of those days, what can you do? Thirty years I’ve been at this game, I have taken a few knocks along the way.
Ding punished O’Sullivan for several errors within the opening two close-fought frames from 2-0 up, the Chinese world No 38 means regarded again. The 35-year-old compiled successive breaks of 88, 94, 87, and 131 in every subsequent frame to edge nearer to the £250,000 winner, prize, and his fourth UK crown after successful the occasion in 2005, 2009, and 2019.
The outcome ranks as one of many greatest shocks within the sport for a few years. Ding, who has received 14 rating titles, has slid down the rankings since that triumph three years in the past and has seen his compatriots Yan Bingtao and Zhao Xintong win triple crown occasions.
Ding will play Tom Ford in Saturday afternoon semi-final after the world No 32 beat Joe Perry 6-4 in his quarter-final. Perry, who received the Welsh Open in March, had breaks of 101, 70, and 66 however Ford had runs of 103, 86, 66, 62, and a match-winning 52 to succeed in the semi-final for the second time.
In the night session, Jack Lisowski a good kind beat Shaun Murphy. Marks Allen defeated Sam Craigie 6-4. The two winners meet tomorrow night.
Lisowski, the world No 12, powered his manner into the semi-finals with an emphatic victory, making consecutive centuries in an excellent show of attacking snooker. He wanted just one hour and 27 minutes to finish his win.
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The 31-year-old will feature for the first time in the last-four stage of a Triple Crown event in his career after a superb performance of scoring power.
After enduring a surprising door edge on a respotted jet, Lisowski reeled off the following four with contributions of 105, 127, 123, and 100.
Murphy stopped the rot with a ton of his own to avoid a whitewash, but his younger opponent duly sealed the triumph after a scrappier seventh frame.
I guess that’s how I’d always love to play snooker, Jack Lisowski told the World Snooker Tour after completing the victory.
It’s not likely, but everything was going in today. The white ball was going where I wanted it, the balls were going in the middle of the pockets.
Trump won his maiden ranking title at the 2011 China Open, was runner-up to John Higgins at the 2011 World Snooker Championship, and captured his first Triple Crown title at the 2011 Championship. By the end of the 2017–18 season, he had won eight ranking titles but faced persistent criticism that he was underachieving in the sport, given his talent.[5] In the 2018–19 season, his form and focus notably improved.
He completed his Triple Crown by winning both the Masters and World Championship, two other ranking events, and became the first player to win over £1 million in prize money in a single season. In the 2019–20 season, he won six ranking events setting a new record for the most ranking titles in a single season. He added a further five-ranking title during the 2020–21 season. Voted the World Snooker Tour Player of the Year for three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021, he was inducted into the Snooker Hall of Fame in 2021. The same year, he crossed over into a nine-ball pool, making his debut at the 2021 US. Open Pool Championship. He was World Championship runner-up for a second time in 2022 to Ronnie O’Sullivan.
The same year he was awarded an MBE.
Trump has compiled more than 850-century breaks in professional competition, making him the third player, after O’Sullivan and Higgins, to reach this milestone. In the 2019–20 season, he became the second player, after Neil Robertson, to achieve 100-century breaks in a single season. He has also made seven maximum breaks in his career.
After two tight frames, both went the way of Ding, who went on to rattle off a series of frame-winning breaks to complete one of the most astonishing results in the history, of the tournament.
The Rocket scored just four points after he’d fallen 2-0 behind as Ding finished the job with a 131 break, cruising into the semi-finals of an event he’s won three times including when seeing off O’Sullivan en route to the title in 2019.
It was the latest and greatest shock in a renewal packed with them and O’Sullivan’s first whitewash defeat since losing 5-0 to Hossein Vafaei in qualifying for the German Masters last year.
The crushing scoreline marked the first time that snooker GOAT had ever lost to nil in any of the Triple Crown events he entered since making his debut way back at the 1992 UK Championship.
However, the seven-time UK champion, who has won 21 Triple Crowns overall, claimed not to care about such a landmark moment in a spectacular career.
