One of the top 16 seeds entering the tournament in the last 32, Trump looked set for an immediate return home after losing the first four frames to China’s Wu, who made breaks of 60 and 69 ahead of the mid-session interval.
Trump used part of that time to look up flights from Riyadh back to the UK, but also somehow rediscovered his form as he made breaks of 56, 101, 61, 89 and 55 to seal an unlikely victory.
Wu, who narrowly missed a difficult long red in the fifth frame which would have given him a chance to seal the whitewash, scored just 35 points after the interval and none in the last three frames.
“I was looking at flights home, I was on Skyscanner I swear,” Trump told Eurosport when asked what he had done during the interval.
“It was expensive as well so I knew I had to win after that. I’m over the moon because the table was playing very strange at the start, the ball was flinging off everywhere as if the balls had been polished.
“I can normally tell when I miss and there were a lot of times when I thought I hit it OK and it was just going nowhere near. It was just about trying to find some momentum and belief because I had none in the first four frames.
“When I got to 4-2 I started to believe then because I got my scoring back and I wasn’t missing easy balls. My safety was very good and he barely had a chance to be fair.
“I’m very, very happy with that. That was one of my best wins just in the manner of digging in and my self-belief.
“This is a big event and I really didn’t want to go home in the first round, especially in the manner of being 4-0 down. I think I can hold my head high for whatever happens the rest of the event.”
Ronnie surges on
Ronnie O’Sullivan eased into the last 16 with a 5-1 win over China’s Lei Peifan, the seven-time world champion making two centuries but typically downplaying his performance afterwards.
“I haven’t had no feel for over two years now so it’s been really difficult to get any enjoyment from it,” O’Sullivan told Eurosport.
“It’s been tough so I decided to just start playing a bit left-handed because it frees me up a bit, I enjoy playing then and can actually practice. Anything to get my cue out the case and when I go in the match I’ve got to try and do whatever I can to compete.
“It’s not pretty, it’s not good, I’m not flowing but what can you do? You’ve just got to go with what you’ve got.”
O’Sullivan will face Zhang Anda in the last 16 after the Chinese player thrashed England’s Ben Woollaston 5-0 in remarkable fashion.
Zhang made three breaks of 138, a 128 and a half-century as he restricted Woollaston to just 15 points in the entire match, all of them coming in frame three.
Former world number one Mark Allen was unable to match Trump’s heroics as he lost 5-1 to China’s Xiao Guodong, with fellow top-16 players Barry Hawkins and Ali Carter losing to Scott Donaldson and Elliot Slessor respectively.
Gary Wilson made breaks of 73, 92, 125 and 102 in a high-scoring 5-2 win over Dave Gilbert, who had led 2-1 after breaks of 103 and 137.
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