Barry Hawkins beats Ding Junhui at World Snooker Championship
By PA Sport
Last Updated: 02/05/18 1:41pm
Barry Hawkins booked his place in the semi-finals of the World Championship with a ruthless demolition of third-seed Ding Junhui.
Hawkins took an 11-5 lead into the final session at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and wasted no time in securing the two frames required to reach the last four.
The 39-year-old left-hander won a scrappy 17th frame as an out-of-sorts Ding continued to miss easy balls, but then finished a surprisingly one-sided contest in style with a break of 117.
Hawkins has now reached the semi-finals or better in five of the last six years, but was not about to take anything for granted ahead of a semi-final against either Mark Williams or Ali Carter.
"I'm in the semis but there's still such a long way to go and there's still some great players in," Hawkins told the BBC.
"I'm not getting too excited, I've been here before and I know what it's like to go out there and play terrible so it can happen at any time.
"I'm obviously over the moon to get through and I thought I played pretty well. I felt like he gave up at the end there.
"I thought I punished him every time he made a mistake and when someone's doing that against you, it's easy to start to missing a few and I managed to keep him under a bit of pressure because he hadn't been until then. There's a lot on his shoulders as well."
In the morning's other quarter-final, John Higgins fought back from a four-frame deficit against Judd Trump to head into their decisive session at 8-8.
Trump moved into a 7-3 lead thanks to a break of 89 in the ninth frame and by snatching the next on a re-spotted black following a brilliant clearance of 64.
But Higgins recovered his composure superbly to reel off five frames in succession with breaks of 65, 61, 53, 56 and 51, the Scot also enjoying an outrageous fluke when potting the green in getting out of a snooker in frame 14.
At 8-7, Higgins led for the first time in the match and Trump did well to win frame 16 and avoid falling further behind.
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