{"id":546741,"date":"2026-07-27T20:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T20:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/546741\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T20:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T20:16:08","slug":"shanghai-masters-ronnie-osullivan-makes-winning-start-to-new-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/546741\/","title":{"rendered":"Shanghai Masters: Ronnie O&#8217;Sullivan makes winning start to new season"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Ronnie O&#8217;Sullivan made a comfortable start to the new snooker season as he won in the first round of the Shanghai Masters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Playing in the first major event of 2026-27, the seven-time world champion claimed a 6-1 win over 18-year-old Chinese amateur Liu Linhao, who was a wildcard entry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The 50-year-old Englishman made four 50-plus breaks &#8211; with a highest of 75 &#8211; as he set up a meeting with top seed and defending champion Kyren Wilson in the last 16 on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">England&#8217;s four-time world champion Mark Selby suffered an early exit as the world number nine was beaten 6-5 by Zhou Yuelong.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The 28-year-old local favourite, currently ranked 22 in the world, made breaks of 83 and then 107 to fight back from 5-4 down.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Barry Hawkins beat Lei Peifan 6-4 to reach the last 16 while fellow Englishman Chris Wakelin cruised through 6-0 against Hewen Tang.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Hawkins will face world number one Judd Trump next in Tuesday&#8217;s second-round matches, while Hawkins takes on Mark Williams and world number two Neil Robertson meets Xiao Guodong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ronnie O&#8217;Sullivan made a comfortable start to the new snooker season as he won in the first round&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-546741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}