Ronnie O'Sullivan led Kyren Wilson 10-7 at the end of the first day of snooker's world championship final after letting slip an 8-2 lead at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre on Saturday.
O'Sullivan was 6-2 up after the underwhelming opening session and won the next two frames before the evening unravelled.
The five-times champion proceeded to lose five out of seven frames as fellow-Englishman Wilson grew in confidence in his first final.
"He (O'Sullivan) had to sit and suffer for a long period of time while he went off the boil and his opponent started to get his tail up and come back," commented six-times world champion Steve Davis on BBC television.
"Kyren's got to come out again and generate some more action in the morning."
The final is best of 35 with the winner collecting 500,000 pounds ($654,200) in prize money.
The day after the two players had pulled off final-frame semi-final heroics always risked falling flat and neither player fizzed immediately in front of a restricted and socially-distanced crowd of around 300.
Both players made basic errors but O'Sullivan, the 'Rocket', still reeled off a century to go 5-2 up and also had three breaks in excess of 50.
"The match is over as a contest. I hope I am wrong because I want it to be a contest but 6-2 is too much for Wilson to come back from," seven-times champion Stephen Hendry said then.
"He looked uptight and it looked like it almost meant too much, he needs to chill out."
The Scot spoke too soon, with world number eight Wilson producing his first century and cutting the gap to 9-7 before O'Sullivan closed out the evening with another win.
Wilson had beaten Anthony McGill 17-16 on Friday in a semi-final decided in a surreal last frame spanning an hour, while O’Sullivan beat Mark Selby by the same score.
Fans had been allowed in on the opening day as part of a pilot programme to test loosening COVID-19 restrictions. The British government then decided to suspend the experiment before resuming it for the final.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Clare Fallon and Christian Radnedge)
