Wu Yize leads Shaun Murphy 10-7 after fearless world final session
Wu Yize’s 10-7 lead over Shaun Murphy came from bold long potting and a 91-point finish, leaving a veteran champion chasing the next shift in snooker’s order.
Wu Yize took command of the World Snooker Championship final with a 10-7 lead over Shaun Murphy, and he did it by playing as if the Crucible stage belonged to him already. The 22-year-old closed Sunday’s session with a crisp 91-point break, then walked off having turned a tight contest into a meaningful cushion before Monday’s 1 p.m. resumption in Sheffield.
What stood out was not just the score but the manner of it. Wu attacked long pots, built breaks quickly and refused to retreat into caution, forcing Murphy to spend more of the evening in safety exchanges than in fluent scoring. Murphy, the 2005 world champion, stayed in touch and remained well within reach of a comeback, but he missed a chance to trim the deficit to one frame at a crucial moment, leaving Wu with both the scoreboard edge and the psychological advantage heading into the final day of a race to 18 frames.
That tension was heightened by the way the final emerged. Wu reached Sheffield’s last match by edging Mark Allen 17-16 in a semifinal that included the longest frame in World Championship history, a brutal test that only sharpened the sense that the young Chinese player has already been forged in pressure. Murphy earned his place by beating defending champion Zhao Xintong 13-10 in his fifth world final, keeping alive his bid for a second title nearly two decades after his first.
The wider stakes stretch far beyond one session. The 2026 championship runs from April 18 to May 4 at the Crucible Theatre, with the winner collecting £500,000 from a prize fund of more than £2 million. The venue’s hosting agreement now extends until at least 2045, underlining how central Sheffield remains to the sport even as the player base changes. If Wu finishes the job, he would become the second consecutive Chinese world champion after Zhao and only the second Asian world champion in history, a marker of how snooker’s center of gravity is broadening.
Sunday’s play also carried its share of disruption. A female spectator was removed after shouting out and apparently trying to invade the stage during the third frame, and a phone interruption brought a warning from referee Rob Spencer. Through that noise, Wu kept his composure. Monday will decide whether Murphy’s experience can still arrest the shift, or whether Wu has already announced the next era with the kind of fearless cueing that makes an established champion look suddenly vulnerable.
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