World Snooker Championship 2018: Barry Hawkins knocks out tournament favourite Ding Junhui
Hawkins took an 11-5 lead into the final session and wasted no time in securing the two frames required to reach the last four
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Your support makes all the difference.Barry Hawkins booked his place in the semi-finals of the Betfred World Championship with a ruthless demolition of third seed Ding Junhui.
Hawkins took an 11-5 lead into the final session at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and wasted no time in securing the two frames required to reach the last four.
The 39-year-old left-hander won a scrappy 17th frame as a woefully out-of-sorts Ding continued to miss easy balls, but then finished a surprisingly one-sided contest in style with a break of 117.
Hawkins has now reached the semi-finals or better in five of the last six years, but was not about to take anything for granted ahead of a semi-final against either Mark Williams or Ali Carter.
"I'm in the semis but there's still such a long way to go and there's still some great players in," Hawkins told the BBC. "I'm not getting too excited, I've been here before and I know what it's like to go out there and play terrible so it can happen at any time.
"I'm obviously over the moon to get through and I thought I played pretty well. I felt like he gave up at the end there.
"I thought I punished him every time he made a mistake and when someone's doing that against you, it's easy to start to missing a few and I managed to keep him under a bit of pressure because he hadn't been until then. There's a lot on his shoulders as well."
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