The World Championship semi-final between John Higgins and Shaun Murphy is delicately poised at 8-8 after a captivating second session at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.<\/p>\n
In contrast to the opening to their match on Wednesday, Higgins appeared the stronger of the two players in their early exchanges.<\/p>\n
The four-time world champion, who turns 51 on 18 May, ruthlessly punished a missed black from Murphy to take the opening frame with a break of 72.<\/p>\n
Englishman Murphy, who is looking to end a 21-year wait for his second Crucible crown, delivered the perfect riposte with an 88 as he took two of the next three frames to draw level at 6-6. <\/p>\n
When Murphy failed to convert a plant to the right middle, his error was again exploited, with Higgins enjoying a run of 57 to edge back in front.<\/p>\n
The Scot then knocked in a wonderful break of 86 off the back of a brave long red to open up a two-frame advantage.<\/p>\n
However, Murphy took a scrappy 15th frame and turned the tables on his opponent to restore parity when Higgins missed a tricky red with the rest down the left cushion.<\/p>\n
Their best-of-33-frames encounter will resume on Friday at 19:00 BST, with another eight frames to be played in the third of four sessions.<\/p>\n
China’s Wu Yize takes a 6-2 lead into the second session of his last-four meeting with Mark Allen, which gets under way at 14:30 BST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Championship semi-final between John Higgins and Shaun Murphy is delicately poised at 8-8 after a captivating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-427023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427023","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=427023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}