At present, the World Championship, one of the most important events in Snooker, is in full swing. However, for China's snooker, the situation is not optimistic. In the first round of the main round, Ding Junhui and Lu Haotian, the Chinese brothers who had just played hard from the qualifiers, were eliminated. Although the other two Chinese players, Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao, advanced to the round of 16 as seeded players. But judging from the 16-in-8 matches that have been played so far, Zhao Xintong, who has high hopes from Chinese fans, seems to have a bad future, and has now fallen behind opponent Maguire. In this regard, some fans said: It seems that Snooker legend superstar O'Sullivan is really poisonous milk, blowing on Zhao Xintong before the game, and as a result, the young Chinese player is unstable or has no chance to qualify.
At this World Championship, there are four Chinese players participating, namely Ding Junhui, Lv Haotian, Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao. However, Ding Junhui, who aspires to win the World Championship, was reversed by his opponents after taking the lead four times, thus failing to advance to the round of 16. With the elimination of Ding Junhui, Chinese fans pinned their hopes for winning the championship on Zhao Xintong, known as the "little rocket". Zhao Xintong is a young player who has performed very well this season, winning one of the three major snooker championships and the German Masters, which has also made his status in the world snooker world a rapid improvement. Many snooker celebrities praised Zhao Xintong, and in this case, the most praised Zhao Xintong was naturally the snooker legend superstar O'Sullivan.
Before the start of this World Championship, O'Sullivan had said that Zhao Xintong was expected to become a great player and could easily win 5 to 6 World Championship titles. O'Sullivan not only praised Zhao Xintong in his mouth, but also treated Zhao Xintong as an "apprentice" in private, personally guiding Zhao Xintong carefully and patiently.
However, is Zhao Xintong really the kind of great player of the future that O'Sullivan said? Can his strength really reach the level of O'Sullivan? I believe that at this point, fans who have confidence in Zhao Xintong will not answer in the affirmative. After all, although Zhao Xintong has won two important ranking championships this season, he once reached the first place in the world rankings this season. However, in addition to the two championships, we must also see that Zhao Xintong has directly staged a round of travel in 9 major events. This also fully shows that Zhao Xintong does have strength, but it is also very unstable. No, after defeating his opponent in the first round of the World Championships to advance to the next round, Zhao Xintong encountered trouble in the second round of the match with Maguire.
Maguire is not very strong, although ranked 40th in the world, but the strength is definitely not bad, in the first round he defeated Murphy 10:8 to advance to the second round. The two have met only once before, in the second round of the 2016 British Championships, when Maguire defeated Zhao Xintong 6-2. In this game, Zhao Xintong took the lead in entering the state, scoring a single shot of 72 points in the first set. However, Maguire is not a vegetarian either, and the second inning came directly with a single 102 points. In the third set, Maguire won again, winning 58-15. In the fourth and fifth innings, Zhao Xintong's performance was really good. First he scored a single 86 points, and then he shot a single 136 points.
But then it came to Maguire's acting time, and in the next three innings, he played a single shot of 65, 107 and 80 consecutive points, and went down three consecutive innings, directly turning the big score into 5:3. In this way, after the end of the first stage of the game, Zhao Xintong fell behind and the situation fell into a dangerous situation. Although there is still a next competition, Maguire, who is not weak, is really not so easy to defeat. I have to say that Zhao Xintong really needs to adjust his state. Although he lost to Maguire 6 years ago, Zhao Xintong 6 years ago is still unknown, and now 6 years later, Zhao Xintong has ranked 7th in the world. Although the current state is average, Zhao Xintong, whose self-confidence has improved greatly, should still have a chance to qualify. I also hope that Zhao Xintong will not really be poisoned by O'Sullivan as some fans say. Come on, Zhao Xintong. Come on, Yan Bingtao.