Higgins’ Stealth Assault on Rankings
John Higgins claimed his third world championship in Sheffield, England and in doing so, opened up a massive lead at the top of snooker’s one-year world ranking list.
If world number one, Ronnie O'Sullivan is snooker’s equivalent of the Essex Exocet, then Higgins must be likened to the Scottish Stealth Bomber.
The 33-year-old Scot has opened up a lead of almost 7,000 points based on the 2008/09 season.
Let’s put that into perspective. The winner of a standard ranking event earns a mere 5000 points and John’s Crucible win hauled 10000. After one of the best season’s on record last year, Ronnie himself had earned what was considered to be a huge gap over Stephen Maguire at the start of the season at just under 4000.
Higgins though has done it without appearing to do anything incredible. Two wins, one final defeat, a semi-final, a quarter-final and no first round losses in his seven ranking outings is though, pretty impressive.
The lead might have been even greater, were he able to compete in the Bahrain Championship, in November. A clash of dates between this new event and the Premier League meant he and three other players had to withdraw.
Even at Sheffield, he looked good throughout, but nothing special. In the second session of his final against Shaun Murphy, Higgins looked shattered early on. After two final frame wins against Jamie Cope and Mark Selby and the epic comeback by Mark Allen in the semis, it looked as though he might have ‘hit the wall’.
But, amazingly, Higgins produced one of the best scoring displays of the whole tournament and reduced Murphy to not much more than a spectator role.
John Higgins has put himself up there with the very best that the game has ever seen with this win. Six times world champion, Steve Davis acknowledged him as “the most complete player ever”.
Global-snooker can’t see any reason why Higgins, who looks a contented family-man off the table cannot reign supreme for years to come.
Meanwhile, because of the way that World Snooker calculate the rankings over two year, O'Sullivan maintains the official top spot, and will remain there until after the world championship 2010.
Other noteable performances in the rankings see Hong Kong's Marco Fu leap six places to number eight, making him Asia's number one player.
Two-time world champion, Mark Williams regains a place in the elite top-16 after a consistent if not brilliant season.
Shanghai Masters champion, Ricky Walden has made great strides moving up from 35 to 20. Other youngsters perfroming well are Liang Wenbo (40 to 27), Judd Trump (41 to 30). You should always respect your elders though, especially when they move up from 29 to 23, which is exactly what the oldest player on tour, Steve Davis has done!
Among the biggest fallers are Grame Dott who dropped out of the top-16 to number 28, although the Scot was looking more like his former self towards the end of the season.
See the full one-year ranking list here…
