Trump beats Ford to reach quarter-finals
Former title winner Judd Trump moved into the World Snooker Championship quarter-finals as he finished off a comprehensive 13-7 win over 14th seed Tom Ford.
Trump, 34, came into this tournament as number two in the world with five ranking titles under his belt already this season, but the 2019 world champion wants more.
“The Worlds is special and all the greats have managed to win it multiple times," said Trump before the tournament started. "I don’t know when the prime is in snooker, but I feel I’m somewhere there or thereabouts.
"Unless I win here it’s a failure for me. If I go home from a tournament and I’ve not won, it’s a failure. It’s a horrible feeling losing and anything less than a win is not good enough."
Trump will face an unseeded player in the last eight as he will be up against either Welshman Jak Jones or China's Si Jiahui, ranked 23rd in the world but a player that reached the semi-finals in 2023.
Jones, 44th in the rankings, holds a 9-7 lead and that match resumed in Saturday's afternoon session.
Impressive Trump moves into last eight for 10th time
Ten of the 16 seeds have already been eliminated from this competition, but Trump has been in superb form as he has swept into the last eight for a 10th time.
On Friday, Trump held a 6-2 advantage and extended that to 9-3, before ending the second session with an 11-5 lead, only needing two more frames for victory.
A break of 76 helped Ford win the opening frame of Saturday, before Trump moved to the brink with an excellent break of 107 - the 979th century of his career.
He missed out on a 980th shortly afterwards, but the break of 79 was enough to clinch the victory.
The last-16 matches are the best of 25 frames, so the first to 13 goes through.
Northern Ireland's Mark Allen, who could end the tournament as world number one, faced Scotland's four-time champion John Higgins on Saturday afternoon in what promised to be one of the matches of the competition so far.
The evening session at 19:00 BST features the start of two last-16 matches as Joe O'Connor, winner over four-time champion Mark Selby in round one, takes on Kyren Wilson.
Stuart Bingham, a Crucible winner in 2015, faces fellow Englishman Jack Lisowski,
Fired-up Maguire leads against Murphy
A fired-up Stephen Maguire built a 10-6 lead over 2005 world champion Shaun Murphy.
The pair have been rivals since they were children, with Maguire the leading Scottish youth player and Murphy the top English young player.
Murphy edged two frames on the black and responded with a fist pump, before Maguire did likewise, punching the table and then punching the air as he moved into a four-frame advantage, only needing three more for victory.
That match will be played to a conclusion on Sunday morning from 10:00 BST.
Any meeting between Murphy and Maguire leads to questions about the so-called 'Chalkgate' incident from their match at the 2004 Grand Prix when Maguire forgot his chalk, the first-round tie was delayed and he was docked a frame.
On Monday, Murphy insisted he had not caused the referee to dock a frame from Maguire and said: "It was a massive piece of wrong time, wrong place and bad journalism.
"People still think I had him docked a frame for forgetting his chalk, which isn't the case. The tournament director docked him a frame because he forced the match to start late. It wasn't the referee, it wasn't me, it wasn't anyone else.
"People saw me and the referee talking and assumed I had him docked a frame. I perhaps should have sat in my chair and said nothing - I was guilty of talking to the referee. It looked as if I said A, B and C and led to X, Y and Z, but it's not the case."
Maguire, who won that match 5-2, felt differently and said this week: "We can't resolve it because he always says he never said to the referee. But he did. He knows he did. But I'm over it."
