Ronnie O’Sullivan beat fellow living legend Steve Davis 6-1 today to advance to the second round of the UK Championship in York.
Six-time champion Davis had come through two rounds of qualifying to be in the last 32 and set up a dream tie with ‘The Rocket’ – himself a four-time winner.
It looked like the 54 year-old might be able to match his opponent when he stole the opening frame on the pink but it proved to be the only taste of success for the Londoner.
In the middle of many excellent tactical battles in the opening four frames, O’Sullivan displayed patience and claimed the next three frames to lead 3-1 at the interval – with top runs of 123 and 97.
Thereafter, Davis had no answer as O’Sullivan reeled off the final three frames with little fuss to book a potential mouth-watering match-up with Judd Trump, who still has to meet Welshman Dominic Dale.
World number one Mark Selby progressed with equally minimum effort after a 6-0 drubbing of an out-of-sorts Ryan Day.
The Leicester cueist was in no mood to hang around as he bids to win back-to-back ranking events following his triumph at the Shanghai Masters in September.
Breaks of 86, 111, 90 and 69 proved that the two-time Masters champion is cueing nicely and will fancy his chances of booking a quarter-final place after Marco Fu upset Stuart Bingham 6-4.
Fu, the 2008 runner-up, hasn’t really displayed any kind of form in the last twelve months since losing in the final of the Masters at Wembley.
However, he played well to lead 5-3 having been 3-1 behind at the mid-session break and, despite a brief reprieve from the Australian Open champion, Hong Kong’s Fu completed the timely win.
Fu remains the only qualifier to have knocked out a top 16 seeded player in the event so far as Shaun Murphy, Ali Carter and Martin Gould all went through as well today.
Neither Murphy or Carter played particularly well in their wins over Li Yan and Robert Milkins respectively – with the latter in particular disarray during a very low quality affair.
Gould, on the other hand, performed better as his match went on with Peter Lines and fired in a 123 century en route to a 6-2 victory.
