'Something special' - O'Sullivan & Higgins renew rivalry
"I might have won the World Championship two years earlier than I did," said a rueful Higgins, who admitted that was one of his most painful losses in his 34-year professional career. "It was a brilliant game. We were only 20 and it was a slugfest, shot for shot.
They are the ones that give you a bit of steel going forward, the games that make you as a player. "You never think of your good wins. It'd be great if you thought of your good wins, but you always think of the ones that got away.
" What made the pair's first Crucible match even more remarkable were the circumstances going into it. The night before, O'Sullivan faced a disciplinary hearing after he had assaulted a World Snooker press officer and could have been thrown out of the tournament. While Higgins waited in his hotel to see if he would get a bye into the semi-finals, O'Sullivan was getting fined £20,000 and being handed a suspended two-year ban.
"There were conflicting reports that he was going to get thrown out," said Higgins. "I was lying in my bed at night thinking: 'Am I going to get a bite of the semi-finals here? '" "I didn't know until one o'clock in the morning whether I was going to play Ronnie at 10am.
"I got a phone call in the hotel. I was staying at the old Grosvenor that's not there any more and it basically says: 'Yeah, you're playing Ronnie at 10. ' "So it's just funny how you remember things.