Ian White won a stage tournament! Woo hoo! Now that's got to slot him into the Premier League combined with his floor form, he's simply playing that well that even if he does nothing of real note in the remaining TV events (which I can't believe will be the case), he's made enough of a case already. As I posted earlier, there's not a huge amount of players outside of the core 6-7 that have made a case to say "pick me, pick me" - Ian's done that now, and if he crashes and burns, it's not like he's a Mark Webster or similar younger player - he's 48 already, give him the shot, if he doesn't perform in 2019 then he probably never will, there's really very little downside.
Ricky Evans made the final, a sharp turnaround from a month ago when he was losing to people a third of my age, and it's a key bump - he should make the Grand Prix now barring any severe weirdness (Burton's called Lennon, £250 ahead of him, in, so I guess it needs something like Terry Jenkins binking over Cristo Reyes), he'll now clearly make Dortmund and the worlds, all of which will help push him up the rankings, he's now #53 in the FRH rankings but will push up a chunk in the next few months. Ritchie Edhouse managed to get through to the semi, putting him into the equation for the worlds, whether he can do enough to get there is another question entirely, but at least he's given himself a chance.
Seems as if Lee Budgen, whoever he is, won the last Challenge Tour event of this weekend, over Michael Barnard, who continued his dominance of the tour, Boulton and Dennant getting to the semi final stage. Good luck to the lad, he didn't do anything of note at Q-School but has been getting progressively better on the Development Tour, so while binking this is still more or less out of nowhere, it should at least give him a bunch of confidence and put him on a list of players to watch down the road.
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 Ian White (UP 1)
10 Simon Whitlock (DOWN 1)
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
20 Kim Huybrechts
Not a huge amount of movement, but lower down O'Connor has cracked the top 50, Evans is three places away from doing the same, Edhouse is now solidly in the top 90 and all of Smith (Ross), Marijanovic and Labanauskas are zooming in on the top 100. Also now cracked the 10 units up barrier for the year as a result of an overall two thirds of a unit profit this weekend. To Riesa and beyond!
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