Murphy Defends a British Open Title Nobody Keeps

Shaun Murphy starts his British Open title defence on Monday in the ranking event nobody has kept since it returned in 2021. Zhao Xintong became world number one on Thursday, reached the Wuhan Open final on Friday, and is due at Cheltenham Racecourse two days later.

The Unibet British Open runs from 31 August to 6 September at The Centaur. Channel 5 will show it live in the UK for the first time, with no seeded path to hide anyone.

The Clive Everton Trophy Keeps Changing Hands

World Snooker Tour brought the British Open back in 2021 after a 17-year gap and kept the random redraw that sets it apart from the rest of the calendar. Mark Williams won that first reboot in Leicester. Ryan Day, Williams again, Mark Selby and Murphy have lifted the Clive Everton Trophy since, and the name on it has changed every season.

No champion has retained it in that stretch. Day’s defence ended in the last 32 in 2023, when Ali Carter beat him 4-2. Selby, the 2024 winner, lasted until the semi-finals last year and then lost 6-1 to Murphy. Williams has won the modern event twice, in 2021 and 2023, but those titles were not back to back.

Reboot winners and how the defence went

1. 2021: Mark Williams beats Gary Wilson 6-4 in Leicester.
2. 2022: Ryan Day beats Mark Allen 10-7 in Milton Keynes.
3. 2023: Day goes out 4-2 to Ali Carter in the last 32; Williams beats Selby 10-7 in Cheltenham.
4. 2024: Selby beats John Higgins 10-5 at The Centaur.
5. 2025: Selby loses 6-1 to Murphy in the semi-finals; Murphy beats Anthony McGill 10-7.

Murphy’s own run last year is the other side of the same format. He beat Neil Robertson, Judd Trump and Selby on the way to the final, then trailed McGill 7-6 before taking the last four frames. The draw can dump a champion. It can also let a player on a heater collect the field.

Zhao Xintong Lands in Cheltenham as World Number One

Zhao’s ranking leap is the fact the July draw sheet cannot show. He beat Robertson 5-1 in the Wuhan Open quarter-finals on 27 August with breaks of 106, 91, 113 and 54, and BBC Sport said that result would make him snooker’s 13th world number one and the second from China after Ding Junhui. Trump’s two-year stay at the top ended the same afternoon, when Chang Bingyu beat him 5-1.

Zhao, 29, is the 2025 world champion and has six ranking titles. After the Robertson match he told BBC Sport he had not had time to sit with the ranking yet.

At the moment, I probably haven’t really had the chance to fully take it in or savour it. I think after tomorrow, I’ll probably start to feel it more. Becoming world number one was definitely one of my dreams when I was growing up.

Zhao Xintong, after beating Neil Robertson, Wuhan Open, BBC Sport

CueTracker logged his semi-final as a 6-2 win over Xiao Guodong on Friday, closed with a 124 break. The Wuhan final is on Saturday against Chang. The British Open’s held-over first round starts on Monday, when Zhao plays Oliver Brown. A ranking crown does not buy him a half of the draw, and it does not buy him a week off.

How the British Open Random Draw Works

Most ranking events lock the bracket so the top names cannot meet until the later days. The British Open does the opposite. World Snooker Tour runs a flat 128-player field with an FA-Cup style draw for all rounds, which means a fresh random draw after every match and no protected route for Murphy, Zhao, Trump or Wu Yize.

The first four rounds are best of seven frames, so four frames win the match. Quarter-finals move to best of nine, semi-finals to best of 11, and the final is best of 19. A bad safety or one heavy visit can close a campaign before a player has found a rhythm, which is the same math that ended Day’s defence in 2023 and rushed Selby out last September.

The winner collects £100,000 from a £502,000 prize fund. The runner-up earns £45,000, losing semi-finalists £20,000, and quarter-finalists £12,000, with £9,000, £6,000 and £3,000 paid through the last 16, last 32 and last 64, plus £5,000 for the highest break. Those sums feed the two-year ranking list that Zhao has just climbed.

A Title Defence That Starts With Reanne Evans

Murphy’s first match is the one the July draw put on the poster. He plays Reanne Evans in a held-over opener at The Centaur, and the winner is due to meet Mark Williams or David Gilbert in the last 64. Evans is a professional, ranked 83 on the main tour on snooker.org, and she reached the Women’s World Championship final in May, where Panchaya Channoi beat her 6-2.

A best-of-seven against a player of Evans’s cue-ball control is still a short night for a defending champion. Murphy knows the other side of that length: last year he beat Robertson 4-1, then Trump 4-3, then Selby 6-1 in the semi-finals. The same bracket style that let him hunt the field now asks him to win four frames before Williams or Gilbert can walk into the next random draw.

He comes in as world number six on the pre-Wuhan list, not as the man at the top of the page. The British Open still listed him among the held-over names because he is the defending champion, which is the only seeding the event really offers.

Held-Over Matches Leave the Stars Exposed

Most of the first round was already played at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester on 23 and 24 July. The remaining openers, the ones involving the leading names, were held over to Cheltenham and go on the table from Monday. Several of those winners walk straight into another heavy name.

Higgins against Vafaei is the harshest of those first-round sheets on paper, and Saengkham, the China Open runner-up, already waits in the last 64 after beating Ashley Hugill 4-2. Wu, the reigning world champion, has an all-Chinese opener with Liu and then, if both win, a meeting with Wilson. Trump’s night against Emery looks gentler until the best-of-seven length is applied, and Walden is the player who already beat Gary Wilson 4-1 in qualifying.

Qualifying also took Stuart Bingham out 4-0 to Chang, Stephen Maguire out 4-1 to Liam Highfield, Thepchaiya Un-Nooh out 4-3 to Jamie Clarke, and Jimmy White out 4-1 to Sean O’Sullivan. One session was enough.

Channel 5 Broadcasts the Chaos for Free

For British viewers the other change is the channel. Paramount’s deal with World Snooker Tour moved the Players Championship, the Tour Championship and, from this week, the British Open onto 5, the first time the station has shown ranking events with the tour’s leading players. Ben Frow, chief content officer for 5 and Paramount UK, said the three events would remain on free-to-air television as part of a push to keep live sport on a channel anyone can watch.

WST chairman Steve Dawson called the British Open “a historic event with its own unique identity including a random draw.” Listings already place sessions on 5 and 5 Action through the week. Tickets at The Centaur were advertised from £15, with under-16 seats from £8 on the Monday to Thursday sessions.

That audience will see a tournament that does not behave like the UK Championship or the Crucible. A first-round frame between Murphy and Evans, or O’Sullivan and Baranowski, can be the last thing a favourite does in Cheltenham.

Wuhan’s Finalists Fly Straight Into Cheltenham

The calendar is the other pressure the July preview could not see. Wuhan’s final is on Saturday 29 August. Cheltenham opens on Monday 31 August. Zhao and Chang, if they go the distance in China, will have had a night or two before they sit in a random best-of-seven.

The form that now lands in Gloucestershire

• Chang Bingyu: Beat Trump 5-1 in the Wuhan quarter-finals and O’Sullivan 6-3 in the semi-finals, per CueTracker, and plays the Wuhan final on Saturday before a last-64 meeting with Chatchapong Nasa.
• Zhao Xintong: Beat Hawkins, Robertson and Xiao this week, is the new live world number one, and opens against Oliver Brown.
• Ronnie O’Sullivan: Beat Selby 5-3 in Wuhan, lost 6-3 to Chang on Friday, and still plays Mateusz Baranowski on Monday.
• Wu Yize: Lost 5-4 to Artemijs Zizins in Wuhan and starts against Liu Hongyu.

O’Sullivan, speaking after he beat Selby, put Chang with Zhao and Wu among the players who can win a ranking event, and CueTracker’s semi-final score backed the warning. Selby still arrives with the season’s cleanest ranking title, the China Open on 16 August, a 10-6 win over Saengkham that was his 26th ranking crown and a fourth China Open. Trump won the Shanghai Masters at the start of August, 11-6 over Wilson, then ran into Chang four days before Cheltenham.

The British Open has handed its trophy to a different player every year since it came back, and it has done so with four-frame matches and a redraw that ignores the ranking list. Murphy’s defence, Zhao’s first week as world number one, and Chang’s hangover from Wuhan all start from the same place. The Wuhan final is on Saturday. The first held-over frames in Cheltenham are on Monday.