Jester wins through in battle with Williams

MARK Selby won the final three frames to beat Mark Williams in a hard-fought contest and reach the quarter-finals of the Players Championship in Milton Keynes.

Both players led in a back-andforth match yesterday that featured seven half-century breaks, but the Leicester potter finished strongly to win 6-4.

He will face John Higgins in the next round after he thrashed Welsh Open champion Jordan Brown 6-0.

Williams made a rapid start against Selby, racing into a 2-0 lead with breaks of 75 and 69, but Selby recovered to level 2-2 heading into the interval, having fallen two points short of a century break in the third frame.

Selby continued his momentum in the fifth frame with a break of 66 to go ahead for the first time in the match.

But Williams replied to make it 3-3 and then won a lengthy seventh frame to take the lead.

Again Selby came back, as breaks of 78 and 73 helped him move 5-4 ahead.

The world No.4 then clinched his place in the next round with a break of 64 in the 10th frame.

Meanwhile, Jordan Brown had a painful reminder of the reality of top-level snooker after being whitewashed by John Higgins in their first round match.

Brown became the lowestranked winner of a ranking event in over a quarter of a century when he beat Ronnie O’Sullivan in a final-frame decider in the Welsh Open on Sunday.

But there was no sign of the Antrim 33-year-old repeating the feat as he was thumped 6-0 by the veteran Scot, who made breaks of 122, 133 and 121 in the first three frames.

Brown had looked largely nerveless during his historic run at Celtic Manor, in which he also beat Selby in the quarter-finals.

Higgins said: “It was difficult for Jordan. He hit such a high winning the Welsh and he probably came out and felt really flat out there.”