John Higgins suspension over match-fixing allegations throws snooker into crisis

The world's number one snooker player was suspended yesterday, hours before the sport's annual showpiece, in the wake of match-fixing allegations that threaten to fatally undermine the sport.
John Higgins, a three-time world champion, was suspended by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association and his manager, Pat Mooney, resigned from its board as the governing body launched an immediate inquiry.
Higgins and his manager, Pat Mooney, were alleged by the News of the World to have agreed to accept €300,000 (£261,000) in return for arranging the outcome of four frames in matches to be played later this year. The deal was allegedly made at a meeting with the paper's undercover reporters in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Higgins was one of a handful of top players seen as central to plans recently unveiled by the WPBSA chairman, Barry Hearn, to revive a sport that has suffered a decline in popularity among television viewers and sponsors in recent years.
Higgins and Mooney were alleged by the newspaper to have agreed to lose a specific frame in four matches later this year. There was no suggestion that Higgins had previously deliberately lost a frame or match. In a statement read out on the BBC before its live coverage of the world snooker final, between Neil Robertson and Graeme Dott, Higgins insisted he had "never deliberately missed a shot, never mind intentionally lost a frame or a match" and said his conscience was "100% clear".
Mooney said that the pair could be "accused of being idiots and possibly naïve in hindsight" but had been the victims of intimidation by what they believed to be "serious Russian crime figures" and clever editing. "However, to have been so deliberately set up in a foreign country when doing nothing other than working on behalf of snooker is malicious in the extreme," said Mooney. Snooker is seen as particularly at risk because of the vast number of matches around the world and the difficulty in telling whether a player has deliberately lost a frame.