Kyren Wilson said that he felt “sick” after suffering a shock loss in the opening round of the 2025 World Snooker Championship on Saturday.
The Englishman became the latest returning first-time world champion to succumb to the Curse of the Crucible with a 10-9 loss.
After losing the opening two frames of the contest, Wilson appeared to ascertain complete control of the match by orchestrating a 6-2 advantage.
But Lei won the last frame of the first session to stay in touch before reeling off the first six frames of the evening session in fantastic fashion to move to within the brink of glory.
The 21 year-old – champion at this season’s Scottish Open – began to feel the heat with the winning line in sight and Wilson pulled the scores back level to force a deciding frame.
Lei, however, ultimately held himself together when it mattered the most and sent last year’s world champion packing.
“I think it was kind of a mixture of things really,” top seed Kyren Wilson told TNT Sports soon after the match ended.
“I didn’t feel like I did too much wrong early on in the session. What springs to mind maybe is that I missed a brown.”
“But other than that, it’s like the snooker gods were against me tonight. I had it all going wrong.
“Taking nothing away from Lei Peifan. He held himself together extremely well as a debutant, and I wish him all the best for the rest of the tournament.
“Anybody that wins a title on the World Snooker Tour nowadays is a proper player. The Chinese are slowly taking over the sport.
“There’s another potential future star. It’s great to see, because obviously I love going out to China and playing in those tournaments.
“They deserve the level of success that they get.
“[I feel] sick, absolutely gutted. It’s not the end of the season that I wanted. It’s very difficult to prepare for a World Championship.
“There’s so much media stuff to do in the lead up to this, so I kind of sympathise with previous world champions.
“It’s part and parcel, I’d have it no other way. It means that I won it last year obviously, so at least I’m on that trophy.
“But yeah, I’m obviously not happy to have lost. It kind of feels like the season’s wasted a little bit, to be honest, with losing that match.
“But that’s just the winner in me. I want to win all the time, so I’m looking forward to spending a bit of time with the family now.
“Hopefully, I’ve done them all proud today. I gave it my all.”
Lei Peifan, who joined the World Snooker Tour for the second time a year ago with success in the Asia Pacific Open Championship, will play either Jak Jones or Zhao Xintong in the last 16.
Elsewhere on day one in Sheffield, Neil Robertson has a huge hole to dig himself out of if he’s to remain in the running this year.
The 2010 champion has often struggled at the Crucible Theatre and that was evident again as he fell 7-2 behind to Chris Wakelin.
A five-frame margin is also what Xiao Guodong boasts overnight against Matthew Selt, with the Wuhan Open winner compiling a brace of century breaks.
The other two matches that reached their halfway points are much closer, with Mark Williams and Barry Hawkins holding close 5-4 leads over Wu Yize and Hossein Vafaei.
Featured photo credit: WST
Wu was sensational for four frames, accumulating 466 points without reply.
Lee Walker made his network BBC commentary debut today. His presence suggests we may not be hearing from Joe Perry at this year’s event.