Stuff that's surprised me today

Post might be a bit venty, so if you don't like people venting, then maybe it's best to ignore this one:

- Ricky Evans whitewashing Michael Smith. I wasn't really expecting him to win, but thought it was a possibility, but 6-0? Really? What's weirder is that it was 6-0 while Evans was averaging 87. That's pretty much unheard of against a Premier League player. It's not as if Smith was missing a bunch of doubles that's dragging things down - he only had two shots in the first place. Oddly, both were at that double of choice of many players, double 19.

- Karel Sedlacek moved on, despite averaging under 80. Now this one was a missed double bonanza, with them missing 56 darts at double between them, so when neither can pin the outer ring, weird things happen, even so it's still a really surprising result.

- Elmar Paulke asking the fans not to boo/jeer/whistle the guy you don't want to win in the aftermath of the Hopp/Brown game. While this is to be encouraged, it's still pretty surprising that he's actually done it given that the last time someone asked for the best of order in a televised PDC event is probably when Wayne Mardle was still active.

- Players not closing out leads. Now Cullen hit some great shots, and that last leg has to be applauded, but I'd have thought that Durrant should really close out a game from 4-2 up with the darts. Of course, it's another missed dart special, missing six in leg seven (why oh why did he go 20 then bull from 102, using it's fine but go bull with the first dart) which turned the tide. Reyes was the same - 3-1 up against Whitlock with the throw and then wins one out of the next six legs, Wade being 4-2 up with the throw against Huybrechts is probably the worst of them.

- Did not expect Noppert to be quite that uncompetitive against Bunting. Some weird shot selection on his last visit, I assume that the 7 requiring 82 was from a missed dart at bull (can't think he'd be trying 48 to leave 34 and pulled it really), so having missed the bull segment entirely, you then try for 25-bull with your last two darts? That have better been a fucking great marker on the 25 to try that.

- Chizzy putting in a right quality performance against Monk (who did the same dumb thing on 102 as Durrant did by the way), that might be the best he's played all year. And he needed to do so. Monk's got to draw encouragement from that, he put in a near 107 average in the legs he lost!

- Speaking more of dumb routes people take, why the hell is Jonny Clayton (there's plenty of people that do this so I'm not picking him out specifically, it's just the first example I saw today) shooting at bull first on 66? Hitting 25 offers no advantage as it's still a single for double, exactly the same as if you go T18 for D6, T14 for D12, T10 for D18... answers on a postcard?

- Callan Rydz won a Development Tour event today. Still some people crying about the whole tour card holder thing on Twitter, I guess it's mostly because Mason can't talk about Khan being KOed via nutshot all day, but as this is apparently technically impossible to do, it's clearly a surprise. In all seriousness, he's been incredibly unlucky the last couple of years in not getting onto the tour, so to be able to pick up a win has got to be a big confidence booster. Heck, with all those tour card holders getting all the cake (Ryan Meikle got the other one today so congrats to him as well), the cards for finishing high in the Dev Tour could easily drop down quite a bit - Rydz made a quarter in events 5 and 7 as well, to go with a semi and quarter on the first weekend, so who knows?