Snooker: Tables for one with a potential feast on the menu

Warming up for a trip to the Crucible: Challengers in the qualifying tournament for the Embassy World Snooker Championship, which starts in April in Sheffield, make their final preparations in the practice area at the Norbeck Castle Hotel, Blackpool, yesterday.

On the other side of the partition, a man who went right to the top of the snooker world in his heyday, Alex Higgins, was belying his "Hurricane" sobriquet, as he tried to reach his only ranking event this season having failed to qualify for the other nine. The man who once sped around the table at a furious pace as he built breaks adopted the guise of a grinder in his best-of-19-frames first-round match against Darren Limburg Photograph: Peter Jay