Graeme Dott fighting to maintain Scottish interest at snooker world championship

Shaun Murphy today bids to inflict a defeat on Graeme Dott that would leave Scotland without a player in the Betfair World Championship quarter-finals for the first in 25 years.

Armed with a 6-2 lead from the first session contested by the former world champions, Murphy has morning and evening sessions of the second-round tussle to negotiate against Larkhall cueman Dott.

With 13 the target for a place in the last eight, and eight frames in the morning session, there is the slim possibility of an early finish, but that would be discounting Dott’s tenacity.

Players from north of the border have landed 12 of the last 23 titles in Sheffield, with Stephen Hendry taking seven of those, John Higgins four and Dott one, in 2006, the year after Murphy triumphed.

But with Hendry retired, and with Higgins, Stephen Maguire and Alan McManus knocked out in the first round, only Dott is flying the Saltire.

Murphy fired breaks of 128, 112 and 99 on Thursday as he impressed.

The last time no Scot reached the quarter-finals was the 1988 event, when Hendry was his country’s only representative and lost in the second round to Jimmy White, the man he would later beat in four finals.