Ronnie O’Sullivan looks to take a big step towards another snooker UK Championship title when he faces Yuelong Zhou in the quarter-finals at the York Barbican on Friday.
The Rocket has already entertained the snooker faithful in Yorkshire by twice coming back from two frames down in his opener against Anthony McGill and again in the previous round against Robert Milkins. He now faces Zhou for a semi final place in the competition.
For the 25 year old Chinese talent, this is probably one of the biggest moments of his career. He’s done incredibly well to get to this stage, but this is going to be a massive test of his abilities and his character as he looks to cause a major upset.
World beater
It’s no secret that, on his day, Ronnie O’Sullivan is a world beater and practically impossible to beat. He’s shown in the first two games of this tournament however, that he can get off to a slow start. He’ll know that he’s been a little fortunate up to this point that his opponents haven’t properly punished him for it just yet.
Zhou’s still pretty early in his career and it doesn’t bode well for his chances that he’s never actually won a ranking tournament heading into this. He’s reached three ranking event finals, but has never really come close to winning one of those. He’ll probably need to play the game of his life to get over the line in this one.
Perfect record
There is a little bit of history between these two, with them meeting on four previous occasions. Unsurprisingly, The Rocket boasts a perfect record against his Chinese counterpart, dropping just two frames in total overall across those matches. Assuming Ronnie is in the right mood, this could easily turn into another comfortable couple of hours for the record six time UK Championship winner.
Zhou will come into this with a renewed sense of optimism, however. The draw hasn’t been particularly kind to him as he faced Neil Robertson in the last 3, but he came out an impressive 6-2 winner despite being the underdog for that one. That win set up a clash with three-time UK Championship winner John Higgins in the last round, which Zhou won 6-3 to boost his confidence further.
Need some luck
As is always the case in snooker, the winner of this match will need some luck. It’s fair to say however that Zhou will need significantly more luck than O’Sullivan if he is to get to the semi-finals of this competition for the first time. The Jumping Dragon has nothing to lose here though, so that could help him play more freely.
The pressure is all on The Rocket, who is expected to win, and win well. He played well in patches in the last round, but did show some weaknesses, missing straightforward pots from time to time. Despite that, he still got over the line and is fully expected to progress into the semis
