Ronnie whitewashed Barry Hawkins yesterday evening at the Centaur in Cheltenham to keep his hopes to climb in the top 16 of the one year list alive.

Here are the scores:

And the report by WST:

Defending champion Ronnie O’Sullivan got his campaign underway with a 4-0 win over 2017 World Grand Prix winner Barry Hawkins.

The Rocket succumbed to a gut wrenching 6-5 loss against fellow Class of 92 member Williams in an epic Masters quarter-final last week. However, he looked unaffected in his emphatic win this evening.

Breaks of 100, 64, 52 and 65 were enough to see O’Sullivan over the line in just over an hour. Next up the seven-time World Champion faces Noppon Saengkham, who defeated Mark Selby 4-1 this afternoon.

World number one O’Sullivan is currently ranked in 21st position on the one-year list and needs a successful week to maintain his chances of progressing in the Duelbits Series. Only the top 16 will qualify for the Players Championship and the best eight will make the Tour Championship.

O’Sullivan said: “I’m just enjoying playing. I’m enjoying competing. I need to have a good run here and in the Welsh Open or my season is pretty much done, until the Six Red World Championship and Sheffield.”

In fact, Ronnie is now provisionally 20th in the race to the Players Championship, but finds himself 12000 points behind Joe O’Connor who is 16th in that list, and that’s a lot. Ronnie has withdrawn from the German Masters, and didn’t enter the Shootout, so he really needs to to go deep in this one and the Welsh Open if he wants to play in the next event of the series.

Tonight Ronnie will face Noppon Saengkham, who played very well in beating Mark Selby by 4-1 on the opening day. Should Ronnie win, he would then play the winner of Ding Junhui v Mark Williams in the QFs. It’s not going to be easy…

Here are some more images shared by WST on social media:

And Ronnie’s century in frame one, shared by WST on their YouTube Channel:

Two more short videos were also shared by WST on Twitter: