Ding Junhui v John Higgins live stream | Players Championship 2024 preview
Ding (right) and Higgins face off in Telford (Ji Chunpeng/Xinhua/Alamy Live News)
Ding Junhui and John Higgins go head to head in a mouth-watering opening match of this year’s Players Championship on Monday.
The Telford International Centre has been the venue of some memorable meetings between the players ranked ninth and 11th in the world respectively.
The 2009 UK Championship final is the most notable with Ding prevailing 10-8 to land the second of his three titles, while he also made a 147 in the previous year’s event against Higgins, who was a 9-4 winner on that occasion.
Higgins has won each of the last five showdowns between the players (including the Championship League), most recently a resounding 6-1 victory at this season’s Champion of Champions.
The Scotsman is fresh from reaching his fifth semi-final of the campaign at the Welsh Open, where he was beaten 6-4 by eventual champion Gary Wilson.
And having recently started working with a sports psychologist, Higgins has plenty of positive momentum ahead of appearing in the event that brought him the most recent of his 31 ranking titles in 2021.
It was an inspired week at the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes for the four-time World champion, who dropped just four frames as he comprehensively dispatched Jordan Brown, Mark Selby, Kyren Wilson and Ronnie O’Sullivan on the way to the crown.
Meanwhile, Ding is seeking his first match win in this event for six years, having suffered four straight defeats since beating Mark Allen in the 2018 first round.
Although, he does have fond memories of this tournament – albeit when it was entitled the Players Tour Championship Finals – having triumphed in 2013 when he recovered from 3-0 down to stun Neil Robertson 4-3 in the final.
Runner-up to O’Sullivan at the UK Championship, the Dragon also reached the semi-finals in this term’s first Players Series event at the World Grand Prix and a further three quarter-finals.
He also produced an inspired turnaround in his only previous Players Championship meeting with Higgins, prevailing 5-4 from 4-0 down at this stage of the 2017 event in Llandudno.
The winner of this match will play either Zhang Anda or Noppon Saengkham in the Players Championship quarter-finals.
Play gets under way at 7pm GMT on Monday and will be contested over the best of 11 frames at the Telford International Centre.