Players Championship 2021: 'It was evil, the toughest ever' – Ronnie O'Sullivan on John Higgins win
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ByEurosport
Updated 27/02/2021 at 10:07 GMT
Ronnie O'Sullivan hit back from trailing 3-0 to complete a 6-4 win over Barry Hawkins in the Players Championship semi-finals, but the six-times defending world champion was still reflecting on the "granite" display of John Higgins to whitewash Mark Selby 6-0 earlier. O'Sullivan believes Higgins produced the "toughest" snooker he has ever witnessed to secure a semi-final meeting with Kyren Wilson.
Higgins masterclass too much for O'Sullivan as he books semi-final spot at the Masters
Image credit: Eurosport
Ronnie O'Sullivan has heaped praise on John Higgins for his "incredible" 6-0 whitewash of Mark Selby in the Players Championship quarter-finals on Friday.
Higgins condemned the stunned three-times world champion Selby to an all-time record defeat in a best-of-11 frame match with the former world number one scoring only seven points and potting only three balls at the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes.
Higgins enjoyed an astonishing 97% pot success rate and finished the match with a points aggregate of 546-7 that included breaks of 60, 70, 63, 100 and 60 as Selby was left to conclude: "I’ve never had a match where I had so few chances. John froze me out from start to finish, he played an incredible match."
"It’s the best I have ever played or ever felt," said Higgins, who could meet O'Sullivan for the first time in a ranking final since the 2005 Grand Prix which the Scotsman won 9-2.
World champion O'Sullivan does not want to face Higgins, part of the sport's fabled 'Class of '92', in a similar mood on Sunday if last month's Masters finalist can overcome Kyren Wilson in the last four on Saturday evening in the chase for a £125,000 first prize.
"I watched it. It was ridiculous. I couldn't watch it in the end. It was granite. It was evil, evil," said O'Sullivan after completing a 6-4 win over Barry Hawkins in the semi-finals from 3-0 behind.
John just showed what a class player he is because obviously Selby is one of the best in the business at winning those types of matches.
"But Higgins, you could see it was almost like he didn't want it to end. It was ridiculous snooker really.
That's probably the toughest match snooker I've seen in my life. It was bordering on obscenely tough.
"Why would you want to be that tough? It was incredible snooker. It's not easy to play. It's okay playing defensive snooker, but you have to play it well.
"John and Selby play it better than anybody so if you can play it well, you play it.
"For me, it's a waste of time trying to play that stuff because I do a lot of hard work 80 percent of the time, but then mess it up with one shot. They are very astute around that stuff. It was a real purist's game of snooker.
"If he starts doing that to me, I'm going to be sitting in that chair quite a lot."
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