World number one Mark Selby slipped three frames behind as Barry Hawkins took a 6-3 overnight lead in their World Championship first-round match.
Selby, who lost in the last eight to Ding Junhui last year, could find no rhythm against world number 22 Hawkins.
Last year’s beaten finalist
Judd Trump
overcame food poisoning to take a 5-4 advantage against
Dominic Dale
.
The 22-year-old was sick before his match and looked off-colour early on before overhauling a 3-1 deficit.
The first four frames of the Hawkins-Selby match each featured half-century breaks, three of them by left-hander Hawkins.
In an eighth frame lasting almost an hour, Selby, who has been troubled by a back injury coming into the tournament, battled to secure three of the four snookers he required, but Hawkins kept his nerve.
When Selby again failed to capitalise, Hawkins added the final frame of the evening to take a comfortable lead into Wednesday evening’s final session.
Welshman Dale secured a two-frame cushion against Trump at the mid-session interval, helped by breaks of 59 and 75, and then went 4-3 up.
But Trump drew level and runs of 53 and 68 saw the Bristolian to a narrow lead.
The match will resume at 1430 BST on Wednesday, with the winner to face Ali Carter or Mark Davis in the second round starting on Saturday.
After his
scintillating run to the Crucible final last year
in only his second appearance in the event, Trump is among the favourites for the title on his return to Sheffield.
But he was clearly struggling to concentrate early on, missing pots in uncharacteristic fashion.
A 44 break appeared to put him in control of a marathon first frame lasting 41 minutes, but when it came down to the black, Trump missed his opportunity and Dale knocked it in.
A run of 57 in the second ended when Trump lifted the cue ball off the table attempting the yellow, but it proved enough for him to level.
The errors kept coming from the world number two, though, missing a black and then going in-off after potting a red to hand Dale the third frame, before the increasingly confident Welshman cleared to the pink with a break of 75 to make it 3-1 at the break.
Successive runs of 54 helped Trump claw back the next two frames as Dale missed good chances to press home his advantage.
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“I have never seen Graeme Dott play as poorly as this”
Dennis Taylor
Former world champion and BBC commentator
The 40-year-old, a two-time ranking event winner, did take the seventh with a 68, but Trump found some fluency to win the last two frames and make himself favourite to progress.
Another Welshman,
Ryan Day,
did manage to sustain his good form as he took a 5-4 lead over another leading contender, China’s
Ding Junhui.
Day, a former top-eight player who has dropped down to 35 in the rankings, knocked in a break of 77 to level at 2-2 after a closely-fought opening four frames.
Ding, a semi-finalist at The Crucible last year, responded with a 100 break on the resumption, but Day won the next three to move 5-3 up before a run of 53 saw Ding trail by only one frame.
They resume at 1000 BST on Wednesday, with the winner to face Mark Allen’s conqueror Cao Yupeng in the second round, starting on Friday.
The other match on Wednesday morning is likely to see a hasty exit for the 2006 world champion
Graeme Dott.
The Scot endured a nightmare opening session against qualifier
Joe Perry,
who without hitting any great heights himself sauntered into an 8-0 lead.
Dott, facing the prospect of joining the late Eddie Charlton as the only player to be whitewashed (10-0 against John Parrott in 1992) in Crucible history, rallied to take the final frame of the session.
But Perry, a semi-finalist in 2008 before dropping out of the elite top 16, requires only two more frames to progress to a second-round meeting with Stephen Maguire, starting on Thursday.
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