JOHN HIGGINS: TIME TO GET TOUGH

The John Higgins affair is the culmination of several years in which snooker has failed to take seriously the whiff of corruption that has poisoned a number of tournaments.

All sports have issues with cheating. Snooker does not have a problem with drugs or with dishonesty in the arena but betting irregularities have surfaced too often to be dismissed merely as bookmakers having a moan.

In days gone by there was the odd match here or there that caused concern. Players have often bet on themselves to lose for insurance purposes. This does not mean any of them lost deliberately but it has now been outlawed.

In more recent times, the growth of internet betting has increased the temptation for players to cheat.

Bookmakers will tell you that the rot set in at the 2006 Grand Prix, played under a round robin format.

It led to an inequality of motivation in certain matches involving players either already through to the knockout phase or unable to qualify.

With no additional financial reward on offer for frames won - unlike in the Premier League - there was widespread concern backstage in Aberdeen that some matches were not contested honestly.

The same thing happened the following year and at the 2008 Malta Cup, where the Gambling Commission were alerted by suspicious patterns of betting.

Not enough was done to stamp this out. That is not to say there actually was widespread cheating but the perception of any sport is almost as important as the reality.

It led to a culture where some players may have felt they could get away with low level rigging, the odd frame here, the odd missed pot there.

Barry Hearn has decided, correctly, to get tough. A new anti-corruption unit has been set up, headed by David Douglas, and players will be severely punished if they fail to report approaches from those seeking to corrupt them.

This is good news but I disagree with the notion that a line should be drawn under what has happened in the past.

I would urge Douglas to institute a cold case review of previous matches thought to be dodgy and take the appropriate action against any offenders.

It should be remembered that Higgins was filmed agreeing to fix future matches but there are players competing now on the circuit thought to have actually manipulated results.

For the good of the sport, they should be thoroughly investigated.

Higgins's version of events has been believed by the authorities even though to many they sound improbable.

I hope he is telling the truth.

Higgins's World Series project with Pat Mooney took snooker to parts of Europe that had never seen the players close up before but it failed to live up to its early promise, largely because of the insistence of using local wildcards, which led to a number of one-sided matches, and the attitude of some of the players, who treated the events as a holiday.

How ironic that an innovation that promised to enhance the circuit proved to be Higgins's undoing.

His manager, Mooney, was supposed to protect him from trouble, not plunge him directly into it.

Mooney has walked away from snooker. He was targeted by figures within the sport who set out to get him for their own reasons. I don't believe this was done to clean snooker up as they approached a tabloid newspaper, not the authorities.

The News of the World story cast a pall over the World Championship and left many of those involved in snooker, myself included, seriously questioning what we were doing.

Few will miss Mooney, who created this mess, but we must not kid ourselves that this is now the end of the affair.

Snooker's failure to take this problem seriously has left its reputation damaged at a time where it looks to betting companies for an important source of sponsorship revenue.

The sport cannot afford any more scandals.