They closed in on Higgins from opposite ends of snooker’s spectrum, and with fewer tournaments the game itself has shrunk, yet somewhere in the midst of this squeeze he found reminders of his old self.
In the Grand Prix final last October, he produced what he considers his best performance to defeat O’Sullivan 9-2, a display so emphatic that it included a record of four consecutive century breaks. It is almost eight years since Higgins won the world championship, and then for two seasons was ranked world No 1, but there are other indicators of the stretch of his talent. Only Stephen Hendry and O’Sullivan have scored more century breaks and more maximum breaks.
Higgins has his place in the memory, but it can still be redefined.
Having endured a three-year drought before winning the British Open in 2004, and then waiting another 11 months until he won the Grand Prix in Preston, Higgins has slipped down the rankings in recent years. This season, though, he is on course to reverse that trend and is provisionally ranked fourth in the world. There is more than just his opponents to overcome, though, as he must also come to terms with snooker’s dwindling number of competitions. The removal of tobacco advertising has washed funds from the game and so drained the calendar.
“It’s a bit stop-start,” he complains with his inherent good nature. “There can be four to six weeks between tournaments, so you take a couple of weeks off and then come back a bit rusty. Snooker’s not a worldwide game, it can’t sustain tournaments every week. It was still good when I came in, but for younger guys now there are more games that are harder, so it’s tougher. There’s not as much money as well, so to make a good living you have to win the majority of tournaments. We’ve just got to keep our fingers crossed and hope it gets better in the coming years.”
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The 30-year-old is not weighed down by melancholy, he merely has a clarity of vision. His talent has enabled him to bank more than £3m so far and there is enough of a competitive structure left to nourish the rest of his career. The emergence of Ding Junhui, the Chinese teenager who won the UK championship, could see the game’s popularity in the Far East blossom, while a television contract with Eurosport has increased exposure in mainland Europe.
Higgins faces Jimmy White in the first round of this year’s Masters at Wembley Conference Centre on Wednesday. Stephen Hendry and Alan McManus will also meet in an all-Scots clash, while Graeme Dott and Stephen Maguire complete the tartan contingent at the tournament, which concludes on Sunday. Although Higgins won the competition in 1999, it is a venue he finds unsettling and so a tournament he greets with uncertainty. Having not played competitively since December 12, when he lost to Ken Doherty in the UK championship, Higgins does not know how robust his game will be in the strain of match play situations. He still trains for four to five hours a day, as he did in his prime, but there are chinks of light in his emotional commitment. He is the father of Pierce, four, and Oliver, one, and so there are other priorities to consider.
“You’ve just got more on your mind,” he explains. “You’re not as focused as you once were. You can try all these books, or go to see psychologists, but your life is just different. When I was 20, all I had to think about was playing snooker, now I’ve got other things, family, bills to pay, just everyday things. I can sometimes play better than ever, like the Grand Prix final, but it’s finding the consistency and you come back to the same thing because there are weeks between tournaments, so you’re on and off again.”
He has found a balance between family and work that provides peace of mind. At the Masters club in Glasgow last week, he played practice matches against Graeme Dott and Stephen Maguire, and if Higgins needs a reminder of his standing, his contemporaries provide it. Both Murphy and Ian McCulloch asked to spend time with him to hone their games and he welcomed their requests for the compliment they contained. In the case of Murphy, though, Higgins concedes he may have given too much away.
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“I was beating Shaun (at the world championship) 4-1 and I’d beaten him before, so I was thinking ahead, that I could get Steve Davis in the quarter-final and that would be a good draw for me,” he admits. “But before I knew it, he’d played some fantastic stuff and I was back up in Scotland. I’d taken him home in my Mercedes (when they had practised together) and he said ‘if I do well, the first thing I’m going to do is buy a Mercedes’. And he did, he showed it to me.”
He tells the tale with a rueful smile. Higgins still finds an invigorating enjoyment from playing tournament snooker and ultimately it is the only career he has known. “I’ll go on for as long as possible,” he grins. And so he might yet return to the very peak of the game, where he once stood so firmly.
Masters snooker, today, BBC2, 1.30pm and 11.20pm