John Higgins kept his Maplin UK Championship title hopes alive last night but not without a real fight.
The three-time UK winner clinched a 9-7 victory over Belfast's Joe Swail in the first round of this year's BBC-televised tournament.
Victory for Higgins in Telford came while his fellow Scots Stephen Maguire and Jamie Burnett were at the centre of match-fixing allegations after their match attracted huge correct-score betting interest.
Large bets were placed on a 9-3 victory for Maguire - that was the eventual outcome - before a number of bookmakers suspended betting, some up to four days before the start of the match. Maguire plays the Australian Neil Robertson, winner of the recent Bahrain Championship, next.
Higgins was level at 4-4 with Swail overnight and the pair battled to 7-7, but the world No.5, winner of the Royal London Watches Grand Prix recently, held his nerve to win the last two frames. He faces either the Chinese player Ding Junhui or the six-time UK winner Steve Davis in the next round.
The Scot was far from impressed with his display, though, and stressed that he must quickly improve to stand any chance of winning this year's top prize. "I'm going to have to play a hell of a lot better if I'm going to win this tournament," said Higgins.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article