Ding Junhui slumped in his chair in the corner of the rink, hands clasped together on his lap and eyes transfixed on the floor, like a man who’d just been given bad news. The score hardly suggested a crisis, at 3-3 in this Masters quarter-final with Judd Trump in a race to six. But the momentum had swung so violently over the past 15 minutes that it was as if Ding had been punched in the gut, the air sucked out of him, and he just wanted to melt under Alexandra Palace’s bright lights.
A puddle on the floor might have been more effective in interrupting Trump’s flow. The world No 1 won the next three frames without conceding a point, hitting breaks of 125, 62 and 75, racking up 368 points without reply. Trump finished the match with 95 per cent pot success, 91 per cent long pot success and 80 per cent safety success. Ding had only missed a few balls all afternoon, but that was enough for a comprehensive 6-3 defeat.
