{"id":240399,"date":"2026-01-12T02:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T02:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/240399\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T02:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T02:42:08","slug":"shaun-murphy-crashes-out-of-masters-on-opening-day-of-title-defence-snooker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/240399\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaun Murphy crashes out of Masters on opening day of title defence | Snooker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The defending champion Shaun Murphy is out of the Masters after a shock 6-2 defeat against China\u2019s Wu Yize on the opening day of the 2026 tournament at Alexandra Palace.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Wu, the world No 13, dominated from the outset and won the opening three frames, recording a superb break of 137 in the second. Murphy, the top seed, rallied briefly but, with a highest break of only 49, could not get back into the contest.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Murphy told BBC Sport: \u201cI\u2019ve looked forward to walking out as champion but I enjoyed it for about the first 10 minutes and the rest of the match was highly unpleasant. It\u2019s possibly my worst performance of my season.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The four-time world champion <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sport\/mark-selby\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Mark Selby<\/a> also endured an early exit as he was beaten 6-2 by the Chinese debutant Xiao Guodong.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Selby, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sport\/2025\/dec\/07\/mark-selby-sinks-judd-trump-to-claim-third-uk-championship-title\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">winner of the UK Championship last month,<\/a> scored only 43 points as he lost the opening four frames and despite responding with breaks of 101 and 76, the world No 11 Xiao reclaimed the initiative with a 118 and finished the job in the eighth frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The defending champion Shaun Murphy is out of the Masters after a shock 6-2 defeat against China\u2019s Wu&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-240399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}