European Tour and the Matchplay

I wouldn't normally make a post after just European Tour qualifiers, but with it being the qualifier for the last event that counts to the Matchplay, I thought I'd make an exception. If you recall, at the back end of May I made a big post projecting who might make it - since then, we've just had the Danish Open, which hasn't really done a huge deal. Kyle Anderson won one game and then was done, Gabriel Clemens was the same, Steve West couldn't even manage the one win. So nobody really made huge strides - I thought Chris Dobey looked safe anyway.

That said, I had it narrowed down to about 10 players. Searle ran into Cadby, harsh but fair. Wilson lost to Gilding. Ross Smith lost to Petersen. Keegan Brown made it. Kyle Anderson lost to Ted Evetts. Clemens lost to Wattimena. West just got home against Scott Baker. O'Connor made it. Schindler ran into Ratajski, and Lennon lost to Menzies. On balance, that's quite a lot of players that didn't manage to get in through their primary route to Blackpool - Keegan Brown is an enormous winner here, I think that extra 1k should be just about enough to get him over the line as long as he doesn't have a complete mare these next two days and a James Wilson or Ross Smith (or, at this stage, Kyle Anderson) doesn't go berko and pop in back to back board wins and say "no, wait, this is my Matchplay spot, fuck off".

Naturally we'll know much more 48 hours from now, and I've been posting a lot about the Matchplay implications, but in the long run these Euro Tour events count for a lot - Corey Cadby's managed to get into both of ET9 and ET10 to make his debut finally, Ted Evetts came through at least one bastard group to do the same, Jamie Hughes has, while on the Euro side Wattimena and Rowby John Rodriguez got through both. It's interesting to note Rowby, he had a good run in the Netherlands, and if you look back at the qualifiers (at least for ET9) he was hitting some extremely high numbers in the qualifying rounds. Could be worth paying attention to in the opening round in Prague.