John Higgins out to end his barren run at York's Barbican Theatre in UK Championships

CHAMPION: John Higgins is keen to enjoy what would be a first-ever success at York’s Barbican Theatre, having never previously won there ahead of the ongoing UK Championships. Picture: Martin Rickett/PA

JOHN HIGGINS has won everything snooker has to offer but he is yet to raise a trophy at the Barbican in York.

The 49-year-old has won 31 ranking tournaments - last month was the 30th anniversary of his maiden success - including four World Championships and three UK crowns.

And while the Barbican is now firmly established as the home for the Victorian Plumbing UK Championship, snooker’s second biggest tournament in the calendar - after the Crucible – it is a venue where Higgins admits he doesn’t have a ‘brilliant record’.

His previous UK wins came when the event was staged in Bournemouth (1998 and 2000) and Telford (2010).

Today he opens his quest for the UK Championship in York against China’s He Guoqiang.

“I’m excited for the UK Championship,” said Higgins. “York is a beautiful city where I haven’t had a brilliant record. That is something I’d dearly love to put right.

“It’s a great time of the year to be in York. You always go to these tournaments with optimism.

“Regardless of what has happened in the run up. It will be a sad day when you don’t go to tournaments feeling like that. So right now, as I’m sitting here, I will go with a bit of optimism and I’ll look forward to it.”

Higgins has built his career on granite snooker, a fierce competitor with a never-say-die attitude. That was never more so evident than the 2010 UK final in Telford.

He trailed Mark Williams 9-5 in the final, but battled back to triumph 10-9.

He said: “Even thinking back now, if someone said you were going to start 9-5 down to Mark Williams and you have to try and come back to win, you wouldn’t think it was possible.

“All I remember was that when I got it back to 9-7, he had a chance to put me away and he didn’t.

“That is what happens in this game sometimes. It just goes against you when you haven’t taken your chance.

“It was an emotional time in my life and my snooker life,” Higgins said in an interview with the official UK Championship tournament programme. His father John Higgins Snr was battling against cancer, and he sadly passed away two months later. “I take a lot of pride looking back at that tournament.”

Today, Higgins’s opponent – the 24-year-old who is based at Victoria’s Academy in Sheffield – is one of 16 players to come through the qualifiers to reach York.

Last week’s four rounds of qualifiers achieved nearly three million views on World Snooker’s Facebook and YouTube channels - almost double last year’s total.

Across the four days on Facebook, there were 1,959,000 views, a big increase on 2023’s figure of 912,000. On YouTube, there were 852,000 views compared to last year’s 580,000.

xxxx