Ronnie O’Sullivan will bid for a fifth ranking title of the season when he faces Shaun Murphy in the final of the Players Championship in Llandudno.
The Rocket has been the dominant force in the sport again this season and lifted the World Grand Prix trophy as recently as February when dismantling Ding Junhui in a one-sided final in Preston.
O’Sullivan has continued his good form this week, brushing aside Graeme Dott and Ding before coming through a titanic tussle with Judd Trump in their semi-final on Friday night.
Having looked in big trouble when trailing 0-2 and 4-5, O’Sullivan kept his cool to take the match into a deciding frame before producing an excellent run of 67 to book his place in the final.
As ever, O’Sullivan was outstanding under pressure, jumping on any errors Trump made, and the 42-year-old compiled the highest break of the tournament so far when making a total clearance of 143 in frame four.
The Rocket is 4/11 to add yet another trophy to his burgeoning cabinet and will fancy his chances of seeing off Murphy, just has he did when the pair met in the UK Championship earlier in the campaign.
Murphy has been the surprise package this week, having missed a couple of tournaments recently through a recurrence of an old neck injury.
Having struggled through his first round match against Kyren Wilson, Murphy found the going even tougher when edging out Anthony McGill 6-5 on Friday.
However, the former World Champion looked in much better heart when making two centuries on the way his 6-3 victory over Mark Williams in the semi-finals last night and could be coming nicely to the boil now.
Murphy was no match for O’Sullivan in the aforementioned UK Championship, losing 10-5, but he did beat the Rocket 10-8 when they met in the final of the Champion of Champions back in November so will be hopeful he can raise his game again.
With both players preferring an open, attacking style of play, we can expect plenty of big breaks from these two heavy scorers.
They have complied five centuries each already this week and with the final to be played over the best of 19 frames, the centuries market could be the way to go.
Sky Bet offer 11/8 for over 3.5 hundreds in the match and that makes a fair amount of appeal with these two heavy-hitters fancied to put on a show for the Welsh crowd.
Posted at 1145 BST on 25/03/18.
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