Quiet week

Nothing really much I wanted to say on the Matchplay final that hasn't already been said, it was a great performance by both players, probably not quite hitting the level of excitement that the Cullen game had, probably due to having money on that one I guess, but there you go.

We had the Auckland World Series event finish earlier, van Gerwen won it, it's really only interesting in these to see the general level of the host players, who didn't do that bad really - McGrath managed to beat Smith, which is a bit of an upset, while Robb and Hurring were able to take it to a decider and both missing at least one dart for the match, while Parry and Puha got four legs each with a 90+ average, an average Pusey also managed against Gary Anderson. Pity that Cadby didn't show due to visa issues (how does that work between Oz and NZ exactly anyway) as getting a read on him would have been good. Of the others, Harris is probably their best right now but drew van Gerwen, while Irwin's their guy at the 2019 worlds, and he lost to Peter Wright. At least it's good to see that some of the first round games were competitive, although the way things worked out it gave Barney a real free run to the final, as he got McGrath in round two and then got Whitlock while van Gerwen got Wright.

In the BDO, it looks like Durrant won in Belgium yesterday, with the Hammer hitting a nine in an early round, and he made the quarters - as did Wes Newton, who lost to eventual finalist Andy Baetens. Wayne Warren made the semis, so showing a bit of what he was doing at Lakeside, while the other semi finalist is some guy from Germany I've never heard of. That should push Hamilton up to where he's close to a Lakeside invite by the looks of things, but I'm damned if I'm going to interpret the BDO's arcane ranking system. Looks like Bruce Montgomery beat Andy Boulton in the Granite City Open last weekend, a few familiar names in the later stages in John Goldie, Brian Woods and Jim Walker.

It was also interesting to listen to the interview from Chizzy's manager in relation to the BDO chairmanship - a lot of what he says makes real sense. Their website is pretty poor and their social media isn't great, what it really needs is a sense of what they want to be. What that is remains to be seen.

The next two weekends we've got the two Australian World Series events, where Cadby should play, then a week off before the Pro Tour kicks off again with a vengeance - a Euro Tour in Germany, two midweek Players Championship events, then another Pro Tour in the Netherlands makes for a hectic ten days, with another Euro Tour events the weekend after as we get towards crunch time for the majors. Should be exciting.