Stockport GOAT

Let's all hail this guy, from the "next players to win a PDC ranking title" post back in May:

4) Nathan Aspinall - This is another one looking at points per turn primarily, placing in the top 25 with very similar statistics to, say, Johnny Clayton without quite the same level of explosiveness. The former world youth finalist has been playing at a good level for a while now, doing well enough to make the European Championship despite not having a tour card, and while he's not managed to make a really deep run in a senior PDC event to this stage, he's at the level where he could do at some stage.

Today it happened, and as a Stockport native I'm absolutely thrilled for the kid, that's immediately got him into the worlds and the Players Championship finals, the Grand Prix is probably a bit too much of an ask at this stage, not looking at whether he's qualified for either of the Euro Tour events that are the only things in the way before the cutoff.

It's also huge for Ryan Searle, whose first final has, according to Burton, just got him into the last place in the worlds as things stand. I'd love him to get there to probably save his card, he's been playing very well - recall the post I made a while ago where I mentioned, in a graph comparing the points per turn of each player with the amount they were actually winning in the Pro Tour per event, and that he was running hugely badly. I don't think he did anything special today from what I recall while collating the stats, it just fell into place and somewhat corrected the negative variance that he had at the time.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael van Gerwen
2 Rob Cross
3 Peter Wright
4 Gary Anderson
5 Daryl Gurney
6 Mensur Suljovic
7 Phil Taylor
8 Michael Smith
9 Simon Whitlock
10 Ian White
11 Darren Webster
12 Gerwyn Price
13 Dave Chisnall
14 James Wade
15 Jonny Clayton
16 Joe Cullen
17 Adrian Lewis
18 Mervyn King
19 Stephen Bunting (UP 1)
20 Kim Huybrechts (DOWN 1)

Weird that after a near month break since the last update, nothing much has changed. Barney's down to #23, Wilson's solidly in the top 30 after his recent exploits (Benito's now well outside), de Zwaan is in the top 32, while Schindler's now up in the top 50 and Aspinall is up to #56. Searle's bumped up to #69.