“I’M NOT sure how you beat somebody when they play like that,” said Shaun Murphy. “He was close to flawless tonight.”

Murphy was speaking after losing 6-0 to Judd Trump in the Players Championship quarter-finals on Thursday night, having sat in his chair and watched his opponent for most of the evening.

The total points tally across the six frames was 524 points to 40 in favour of Trump, and the manner of this victory has made him the clear favourite to win the tournament.

The Players Championship signals the stage of the snooker season where everyone is looking towards the upcoming World Championship — that is if they haven’t already had one eye on it since the season started last June.

The Tour Championship in Manchester, with its longer format matches serving as good preparation for the Worlds, gets underway at the end of this month and the World Championship qualifiers themselves begin at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield in just over three weeks when players outside the top 16 will play for a place at the Crucible Theatre.

Trump has already won the Shanghai Masters, the Saudi Arabia Masters, and the UK Championship this year, but a player of his quality in this sort of form will be aiming for World Championship glory.

He is already considered the number one player in the game per the rankings, having held the spot since August thanks to his good early season form which saw him reach three consecutive finals and go top of the rankings for the fifth time in his career.

Reaching the number one is itself a big achievement. Since snooker introduced a ranking system back in 1975, only 12 players have held the top spot. They are rarer than World Champions, of which there have been 23 in the same period.

The ranking system could be compared to a league table in other sports, as a player has to be consistently good to reach number one and be even better to stay there.

Since the rankings were changed from yearly updates to rolling updates in 2010, only Mark Selby has spent longer at number one than Trump.

Stephen Hendry has the longest total reign, having spent nine years at the top, including eight years consecutively between 1990 and 1998, when the rankings were updated yearly.

Hendry is just above other greats Ray Reardon, Steve Davis, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and Selby who have each spent around seven years at the top of the charts.

Trump still has some way to go to reach the sustained levels of those players and other modern greats such as John Higgins and Mark Williams, all of whom also have multiple World Championships to their name while Trump has just the one in 2019.

Given O’Sullivan has missed much of the 2024/25 season having withdrawn from numerous tournaments since going out in the first round of the UK Championships in November, the onus has fallen on other players to step up and become the stars the game needs.

Trump’s entertaining play, which comes into its own especially once a frame is won, makes him one of the players who can maintain the popularity of the game with special shots and great break-building. 

A best-ever season for Chinese players has also helped boost the game’s global popularity.

Trump will face the winner of the quarter-final Higgins and the highest-ranked Chinese player, Xiao Guodong, in Saturday night’s Players Championship semi-final. Neither will be an easy opponent.

On his day, Xiao’s break-building can be up there with Trump’s, but the Englishman is some way ahead of the pack in terms of high-scoring breaks this season and is now targeting 100 century breaks by the end of the World Championship.

“It was just a real pleasure to watch Judd in full flow,” added Murphy. “I don’t think I did a great deal wrong in that match at all. I don’t remember making six frame-losing mistakes.

“It was incredible to watch. Every shot I left him, he potted and there was a certain inevitability about his break building. He is one of the best scorers and he was close to flawless tonight.”

As the 2024/25 season approaches its end, the game’s best players will be looking to round off their campaign with a good performance at the World Championship next month.