John Higgins deserves total admiration for finding a way to win that snooker world championship. In the space of a week, he had to fend off the most talented player (Ronnie O'Sullivan), the new world number one (Mark Williams) and an unbelievably talented runner-up in Judd Trump. Higgins may not be the most spectacular of that quartet but he refused to lose, and that mental toughness separates the best from the rest.
Is that victory, however, the last stand of Higgins' generation? For the game of snooker, it would have been fantastic for the world champion to have emerged from the Ding v Trump semi-final. At 21 years old, Trump played such an attacking game, with such success, that he almost appears to have reinvented the game within a fortnight. If Ding were to manage to win in the coming years, with the world's most populous country watching in their millions, the game would really take off the planet over - the world title has still never been won by anyone from outside UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth.
A new generation is in the verge of breaking through. It promises to be exciting to watch the new era.
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