Tom English: 'Higgins is stupid, that's a given. But he is not a match-fixer'

Published on Saturday 8 May 2010 20:10

AS LOVERS of sport, our tolerance of the cheats in our midst is now lower than it has ever been in history.

• 'John Higgins has now entered the ranks of the disgraced'

All these match-fixers at play; the dopers in so many different sports, the bung-merchants in football, the ball-tamperers in cricket, the trainers and jockeys who stop horses from winning, the blood capsule specialists in rugby, the snooker players who throw matches, the guys who sanctioned a Formula One driver to deliberately crash his car into a barrier so as to gain advantage for a team-mate.

Sport is full of this. Are you cynical? Well, if you are, you have every right to be.

There is a belief that money is the cause of it all, that professional games have become corrupted by Mammon. Of course, it's not as simple as that. When Dean Richards, the former Harlequins rugby coach, gave one of his players a fake blood tablet and told him to bite down on it in the dying minutes of a Heineken Cup quarter-final last season it was stated widely that it was the pursuit of money in a heavily pressurised commercial world that made him do such a desperate thing. Maybe. But there was cheating in rugby, as in other sports, long before there was cash. Grannygate happened in the supposedly pure amateur era. Steroid-abuse was prevalent decades ago. Cheating in another form – horrific and malicious on-field violence – was at its worst when there wasn't a shilling on offer to rugby's biggest names.

The same goes for so many other sports. Perhaps all other sports. Tommy Simpson, the British cyclist, died in the mountains of the Tour de France with performance-enhancing drugs in his pocket. Match-fixing in football goes back a hundred years. Even in golf, a sport that likes to think of itself as whiter than white, there has been allegations of cheating levelled against some of its most storied champions of the past, some of them by fellow players. So when we hear of a new revelation about a previously pristine sports star then we tend to accept it at face value, because how many times have we heard these footballers and cyclists and runners and swimmers plead innocence only to be proved guilty beyond doubt at a later point?

John Higgins has now entered the ranks of the disgraced. As of last Sunday, when the News of the World claimed he was willing to fix matches in return for cash, his reputation hit the gutter. In the court of public opinion, he is already guilty. Barry Hearn, the head of World Snooker, made it plain in word and deed that Higgins has it all to do to avoid a ruinously long ban from the sport. In talking up the no-nonsense hardness of the man who will investigate the Higgins case – David Douglas is a former Metropolitan Police detective chief superintendent – Hearn left nobody in any doubt. He suspects Higgins is bang to rights and the impending punishment will likely reflect that.

The News of the World was full of condemnation, as you would expect. Higgins had been "bragging" about the money he wanted, they said, even though there is no evidence to support that claim. He'd been "demanding" hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was, they reported, "a disgraceful deal", a "scandal". He had behaved "disgustingly". They had video of him appearing relaxed as he went along with the plot to betray his fans. The most natural thing in the world is to join the bandwagon against Higgins. As Hearn said, it doesn't look good. The News of the World branded him a match-fixer and that has now gone into the public psyche. Higgins tried to throw matches. Fact.

Higgins' behaviour should trouble us greatly, but so, too, should the level of entrapment at work. The News of the World spent fortunes getting Higgins to Kiev. They set up meetings – one lasting seven hours – with his, frankly, stupid manager, Pat Mooney. They created websites to convince Mooney that they were genuine in their wish to fund new tournaments on his World Series circuit. They put fake stories on their fake websites to make themselves look authentic. They flew their targets to Ukraine and arranged that they be swept through customs in rapid order and into the back of waiting cars. This was a heavily financed sting operation, a vast set-up. They got out of Higgins an admission that he would be prepared to throw a frame in an exhibition match for money. Not a ranking event, not a tournament of any merit, a challenge match.

That, of course, is not acceptable. It compromises the integrity of snooker and creates an impression that "they're all at it" when, in fact, they are not. Snooker has become a big-betting sport. And so it is policed more tightly now than it ever has been. If something iffy happens in the gambling markets, it is reported in double quick time. If there is a questionable result, the authorities climb all over it.

There are nuances to this that should make us pause before finding Higgins guilty of match-fixing. He is monumentally stupid, that's a given. But he is not a match-fixer. Higgins appears to agree to lose four separate frames in four separate exhibition tournaments in unspecified locations at unspecified times in the future. Losing one frame in a match is not match-fixing. It's immoral, and it is a form of cheating, but it is not as cut and dried as the News of the World would have us believe.

Wouldn't you like to see the unedited transcripts of the interviews and the uncut video before deciding that Higgins deserves a ban that will range from eight years to life?

Higgins didn't help himself with his explanation that he was spooked by what he thought was the Russian mafia threatening him. It was a risible piece of nonsense. If it was the case, as Hearn has pointed out, then why didn't he contact Hearn and tell him what was going on? Higgins never made the call. Ultimately, that damns him in the public eye. It allows the opinion to be formed of him as dodgy and the opinion will likely never be broken down.

We should wait for the hearing before casting a final judgment, though. Before issuing a ban that will not only end his career but destroy his life, every facet of this sordid episode needs to be explored. Higgins has many, many questions to answer, but the idea that the News of the World was performing some kind of moral service to the game when luring him into that room in Kiev needs some challenging also. Much of this still makes little sense when you look at it deeply.