Steve Davis

SNOOKER – World Championship: Steve Davis made a poor start to his quarter-final against Neil Robertson this morning as the Australian took a 4-0 lead at the mid-session interval at the Crucible.

The six-times former champion was wasteful in the opening frames and lost them all to Robertson, 28, who reached last year’s semi-finals at the Crucible.

Robertson was in an unforgiving mood and piled on the points whenever Davis left him with an opening.

He had early breaks of 92 and 63, while 52-year-old Davis was given ample opportunity to score but was running out of position too frequently and missing pots he would have made in his second-round clash with John Higgins.

Another former world champion was also struggling, as Scotland’s Graeme Dott fell 4-0 behind to Northern Ireland’s Mark Allen — a left-hander, like Robertson.

Nobody has played as consistently well as Allen so far in this tournament, with the 24-year-old dropping just nine frames in his opening two wins, and he was maintaining his form against 2006 winner Dott, who had crushed world number two Stephen Maguire in the previous round.

Allen, also a losing semi-finalist last year, had breaks of 66, 58 and 54 in establishing his emphatic interval lead.

Steve Davis