Chinsanity

So we have another new winner on the European Tour, and it's in the shape of Daryl Gurney, who claimed it with an 8-6 victory over Ricky Evans, who made a nice fightback from an early deficit but was ultimately unable to get over the line. Still, it's putting him in amazing shape for all the majors, and I believe it should actually get him seeded for the next couple of Euro Tours that'll take place.

Semi finalists were Keegan Brown, who was able to back up his Saturday heroics but seemingly just ran out of steam in his match with Evans, and Adrian Lewis, who continues a consistent start to 2019, solidifying a place well up the Pro Tour order of merit.

The weird thing about Gurney winning, and you can add on the final he made earlier this month as well, is that he's not playing completely lights out stuff as you'd think - compiling all the points per turn for 2019 and chucking out players who've only played one game, he's not even in the top 16. It's even more weird to think that, if he's doing that with very good but not spectacular averages, his losing average is within one point of his winning average - so he's won titles without putting up a bunch of great winning legs, and if anything he's been running bad in terms of results. His losing average is 13th, while his winning average is just around 40th, depending on how many players on short sample sizes you want to chuck out. Some players that have averaged more in winning legs include Matt Clark, Jan Dekker, Marko Kantele, Madars Razma... if we make up a stat called consistency on the fly, subtracting losing average from winning average, and limit it to players who've played at least 100 legs this year, Gurney's 12th. Pop quiz - who's the only player to have a negative score (i.e. to be scoring more per turn in losing legs than winning legs)?

New FRH rankings:

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

I suppose other than Gurney overtaking Price, getting a safe 14k+ point lead which ought not to be overtaken soon, the key point is that we now have a second Dutchman in the top 20 for the first time since god knows when, there's nobody else even in the top 30 from the Netherlands, although de Zwaan and Noppert are both close. Keegan Brown's one place outside the top 30, Ricky Evans climbs into the top 40, there's not a huge amount of movement beyond that.

We've had a couple of Asian Tour events, DartConnect is a complete clusterfuck but Wikipedia's saying that Malicdem and Ilagan won the two events, so I'll take their word for it. This month we've got two weekends of Players Championship events, the second one having a couple of Euro Tour qualifiers, then Euro Tours 3-4 in Germany, with a Development Tour event going on at the same time on the first of those weekends. The road to Blackpool's hotting up.

Also, it's Matt Edgar.