World Cup

I have very little time to bother about non-ranked events - I don't include any of them in my statistics, but the World Cup is often one that I try to pay casual attention to, mainly because the format allows us to see certain players on TV that we don't normally see outside of the worlds, and that might give us some indication as to what's going on.

The problem is the format. As I alluded to on 2+2, for those that read the darts thread there, pairs is a hugely different format - you get no ability to gather any cadence or rhythm which you would do in a singles matchup. It's incredibly easy for a player to be knocked out of their play just in singles - Gerwyn Price seemed slightly tilted against Oreshkin earlier today, although it made no difference to the end result, multiply that by adding two extra players in, even accounting for one being your team mate, you aren't able to draw much at all from it.

So what can we look at? Not much. I guess we know Paul Lim and Larry Butler can still hang at the top level, but class is permanent, and the main nations can still choke if given the opportunity to. Scanning through the results, the Greek player that isn't Michael didn't seem awful, albeit inconsistent, Oreshkin is much like we've always thought, great peaks but bad troughs, Koltsov seems similar, the Brazilians look bad, whoever wasn't Petersen for South Africa doesn't appear good.

I honestly don't see why they don't run with the same format as they do in round 2 onwards for round 1. You'd need to open up the Thursday and Friday for afternoon sessions, but hey, that's more potential ticket sales.

The only other thing I feel worth mentioning is the format in terms of doubles order - from what the TV commentators made out, whoever opened up in the first singles game needs to start each doubles leg. Not only is this incredibly stupid, but if it is the case, surely unless you have a situation whereby you're a weaker nation and your best player might beat the opponent's second player but clearly lose to the main guy, you just put out whoever is better at finishing first? The typical leg is won in fifteen darts - if so, each player in the pair has two scoring visits. It really doesn't matter that much which order the first four visits are in, you're going to end up in more or less the same spot. But from there, I clearly want whoever is better at cleaning up to take the fifth visit. Say Lewis got his usual case of can't be arsed to play on the continent and Wade was drafted in as a last gasp replacement. Who would you want to finish some high two figure/low three figure shot if the tournament depended on it? I'm guessing it's not going to be Dave Chisnall.