O'Sullivan Sets About Shotgun

Ronnie O'Sullivan reached the semi-finals of the UK Championship yesterday with an emphatic 9-2 victory over Jamie Cope.O'Sullivan, a three-times winner of this title, led 6-2 at the interval after a session of high-quality snooker against an opponent who earlier in the tournament had crushed the world champion, John Higgins, and he needed only 27 minutes after that to complete his win.

Cope, who has been known as Shotgun since he was a junior because of the speed and deadly accuracy of his potting, went 2-1 up through breaks of 69 and 92, but his safety game is not of the same standard.

As usual, O'Sullivan scored heavily and fluently, including frame-winners of 137, 62 and 94 when he was in close. As the harshest of self-critics, he has long been dissatisfied with the inconsistency of his long potting but in every tournament he remains the man to beat and now seems far less likely, in terms of mental equilibrium, to beat himself by imploding, as he sometimes has.

O'Sullivan will now face Mark Selby in the semi-finals after the latter beat Hong Kong's Marco Fu 9-7 last night in a game which finished with a 77-minute final frame. Stephen Maguire, winner of last month's Northern Ireland Trophy, will play Sean Murphy, the 2005 world champion and provisional world No1, in the other semi-final.