The only person this evidently did not surprise was Ronnie O’Sullivan himself. He has spent much of the past fortnight warning anyone who cared to listen that he was playing dreadfully.
It is also now six years since he began predicting that Zhao Xintong, a Chinese player he once mentored, would be the next dominant force in snooker. But even O’Sullivan surely did not expect the scale of the dismantling that duly came his way.
Beaten 17-7 in the semi-final of the World Snooker Championship with an entire session to spare, it was the sort of bullying defeat that O’Sullivan has made a habit of inflicting on others over the past 30 years.