World Snooker Championship 2025 LIVE RESULTS: Higgins in TENSE battle, Brecel beats Day, O'Sullivan crushes Carter
THE WORLD Snooker Championship is rolling on at some pace at The Crucible!
John Higgins is currently locked in a tense battle with Xiao Guodong.
Former world champ Luca Brecel has officially fought back to overcome Welshman Ryan Day.
Ronnie O'Sullivan was in INCREDIBLE form as he battered rival Ali Carter to reach the second round, where he will face off with Pang Junxu.
The Rocket entered the session with a 5-4 lead and then reeled off three centuries to win five consecutive frames and set up a meeting with Pang Junxu in his first snooker tournament in three months.
19th Apr 2025, 10:29 By Jim Sheridan
Latest scores – Morning session
Peifan gets going after that missed red from the defending champion, scoring an unanswered 58 points.
But a failed cannon into the pack lets Wilson back onto the table.
There are still 75 points left - this one could get cagey as both players begin to play safe.
Kyren Wilson 0-0 Lei Peifan
Xiao Guodong 0-0 Matthew Selt
19th Apr 2025, 10:21 By Jim Sheridan
Latest scores - Morning session
The nerves clearly playing a part for Lei Peifan.
A disaster of an opening break, smashing into the blue which flies into the pocket.
Wilson can't cash in though, missing the long red into the right corner.
Kyren Wilson 0-0 Lei Peifan
Xiao Guodong 0-0 Matthew Selt
19th Apr 2025, 10:15 By Jim Sheridan
Here come the players
It's go time at the Crucible.
Defending champion Kyren Wilson gets a rapturous reception from the crowd.
Time to see if the Crucible Curse strikes again.
Kyren Wilson vs Lei Peifan
Xiao Guodong vs Matthew Selt
19th Apr 2025, 10:05 By Jim Sheridan
Davis on Crucible future
"This is the best snooker venue we are ever going to have."
A bold statement from Steve Davis - and made amid speculation the Sheffield arena could soon lose the World Championship.
The players are about to make their entrance infront of a capacity crowd in South Yorkshire.
19th Apr 2025, 09:58 By Jim Sheridan
Draw in full
We're focusing on Kyren Wilson's first-round clash against Lei Peifan this morning, with Xiao Guodong and Matthew Selt on Table 2.
As we await the players in Sheffield, here's a full rundown of matches coming at you over the next few days.
Judd Trump vs Zhou Yuelong
Zhang Anda vs Pang Junxu
Shaun Murphy vs Dan Wells
Ronnie O'Sullivan vs Ali Carter
Ding Junhui vs Zak Surety
Mark Allen vs Fan Zhengyi
Jak Jones vs Zhao Xingtong
John Higgins vs Joe O'Connor
Neil Robertson vs Chris Wakelin
Xiao Guodong vs Matthew Selt
Mark Williams vs Wu Yize
Barry Hawkins vs Hossein Vafaei
Mark Selby vs Ben Woollaston
Kyren Wilson vs Lei Peifan
Luca Brecel vs Ryan Day
Si Jiahui vs David Gilbert
19th Apr 2025, 09:47 By Nyle Smith
Baulk at the idea
TNT Sports have left fans shocked after announcing their commentary team for the World Snooker Championship.
The BBC will continue to air the bulk of the sessions in Sheffield, with every match available on iPlayer.
But the switch to TNT Sports means fans will access an all-new commentary team.
That includes chief commentator Darren Fletcher, who is often heard on Champions League matches and at big boxing events.
He is often accompanied by Ally McCoist for those big European nights, and the Scot is set to join him for the snooker.
The news was confirmed during Arsenal's 2-1 win over Real Madrid on Wednesday - much to the surprise of viewers.
19th Apr 2025, 09:30 By Nyle Smith
History in the making?
Surely Ronnie isn't going to withdraw because he is chasing a history-making 8th World Championship?!
But who dare tell him what to do especially after he has won this competition the most amount of times along with Stephen Hendry.
Here are the years of O'Sullivan's previous wins:
2001
2004
2008
2012
2013
2020
2022
By Nyle Smith
Ronnie's reality check
Ronnie O'Sullivan fears he has lost his bottle — and warned he may quit the World Snooker Championship if he has 'a meltdown'.
The Rocket said: 'I'm not playing until Tuesday. So if I have a meltdown, who knows? I might still bloody withdraw. I hope I don't.
"I'm surprised I'm here but I'm here. I don't have any expectations.
"I'd just like to not feel all at sea out there. If I can just play and at least feel semi-competitive, I'd be happy with that.
"Could I win the whole thing? I doubt it. I'd be very happy to just give Ali a game.
"I'm nearly 50 now and there's a lot of young guys who are hungry and competing all the time. It's a bit different to say 2012, 2013."
19th Apr 2025, 09:02 By Nyle Smith
The Crucible curse
The Crucible curse is the quip given to the fact that no first-time world champion has ever retained their crown the following year.
Since the tournament moved to the Crucible in 1977 it has cursed 19 players in a row with every debut champion crumbling under the pressure of snooker 's grandest stage.
Some have come close though - Joe Johnson and Ken Doherty both made it to the final the year after their maiden victories - but most don't get anywhere near that far.
As recently as 2023, Luca Brecel was doomed by the curse, losing in the first round of the 2024 tournament after winning the title the year before.
Brecel is not on his own though - seven champions have gone on to lose their first match the following year.
Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry, Ronnie O'Sullivan and Mark Selby have all managed to win consecutive titles at the Crucible, but they had won the championship previously.
Wilson returns to South Yorkshire as the reigning champion and is determined to lift the curse and posted a hilarious video to social media in an effort to exorcise the demons.
In the video, Wilson jokingly completed some of the superstitions people believe to bring us bad luck, including smashing a mirror and holding his World Championship trophy next to a black cat.
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Is being too good at sport too young a curse? Of course it is
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His early breakthrough, his ability to speak eloquently despite his tender age and his photogenic looks made him the perfect subject. Things hit the skids early, though. At those Olympic Games in 2008, Daley was partnered with Blake Aldridge who was, at the time, almost twice Daley's age and after the pair under-performed in the 10m synchro event, Aldridge essentially blamed the young Daley for their failure. Tom Daley at the Beijing Olympics 2008 (Image: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images) Daley's life, despite his Olympian status, was then a struggle for quite some time. He endured severe bullying at school, leading to him being home-schooled, developed an eating disorder and, most traumatically, suffered the death of his father just days after his 17th birthday. Paparazzi essentially gatecrashed Daley's father's funeral to grab photos of the teenager, something Daley describes in this documentary as feeling 'really abusive'. Now aged 31, married with two kids and having retired from competitive diving, Daley appears a genuinely happy and content man. But the struggles he endured to reach this point have clearly been sizeable and it's hard to ignore that so many of them came as a direct result of his athletic talent being so far ahead of his development as a person. Inevitably, if you're only 13 or 14 years old, you're entirely unequipped to deal with challenges that many adults struggle with. It's why, if you're a world class athlete who is still a child, sport can be such a challenging and, at times, destructive environment. And it's why so many athletes who were child stars, if that's what you'd call them, end up as ill-adjusted and damaged adults. Daley has, it seems, come out the other side as healthy and as balanced as anyone. Perhaps it helped that it wasn't until 2021 he won his long-coveted Olympic gold medal, over a decade after his Olympic debut. But Daley isn't the only athlete who has struggled to adjust to being a child sporting superstar. There are, of course, several walks of life in which child stars emerge but the significant difference between sport and say, entertainment is that it's a given that fame goes hand-in-hand with appearing in films or television. In contrast, I've never met a single athlete who began diving or kicking a ball or running round a track because they wanted fame. Rather, they did it for the love of the sport and fame was a by-product, more often than not an unwanted one, of subsequent success. Daley is by no means an anomaly when it comes to struggling with being a very good athlete very young; the sporting world is littered with athletes who were precocious talents but the pressure and fame that was heaped upon them frankly, messed them up. From Jennifer Capriati, the tennis player who turned professional at the age of only 13 and won Olympic gold aged just 16 before suffering many personal problems that included her being arrested several times to Kamila Valieva, the teenage figure skater who, as a 15-year-old, went into the 2022 Winter Olympics as favourite for gold but ended those Games having been handed a doping suspension and suffered a public meltdown, the perils of being very good at sport at a very young age are plentiful. Jennifer Capriati also excelled at a particularly young age (Image: AFP via Getty Images) It's easy to see exactly why individuals who become world class athletes while still teenagers or, in Daley's case even younger, struggle so badly with what elite sport brings. The fame and attention can be a heavy load to bear and the constant media attention and scrutiny is something may adults are not equipped to deal with, never mind expecting a child to cope. Having the press and the public watch your every move and having so many people invested in your success of failure would be enough to send anyone mad. It's easy for people to trot out the line that age is only a number. Sometimes, this is entirely true. But in other cases, age isn't only a number, it's also a sign that someone isn't ready for what's about to be thrown at them. Daley's retelling of his life story is a reminder that while excelling at sport at an unusually young age brings many positives, it also brings many, many negatives. The Englishman has, in the end, come out the other side intact and in a good place. Not all athletes who excelled while very young are so lucky.
