Such joy. I have no idea why the PDC persists with a company that seems incapable of watching a TV and entering what the opposing player has thrown with such alarming regularity, one can only assume Uncle Barry was locked down to a twenty year contract at some point and is stuck with the useless fuckers. Still, at least the PDC has refs, which is more than other organisations have...
In any case, huge thanks to Martin, Carl and whoever runs @theredbit180 on Twitter for helping me piece together the stats for the Wright/Gurney match. It's always great when a community doing things for the love of the game can piece things together better than a multi million pound organisation.
So we're down to Cross/Gurney and Durrant/Smith, the key thing here being the possibility of Glen saying "butnahhhhh" to Jamie Hughes stealing his Grand Slam spot by swiping it straight back with a victory, it should be interesting to note at this stage that the prize for winning the semi final is worth less than the prize for winning the quarter final, the same stupidity that exist in the Euro Tour going from the quarters to the semis, except on a much larger scale. That means by beating Smith, Durrant would only get up to #22 in the FRH rankings, rather than the top 20 which he would have done with any sensible prize structure.
I'll look at the odds for tomorrow's matches in the morning. I could look at the Duzza match now but frankly these past few days have taken things completely out of me. It won't take long to shove things into the master computer, but it may take a bit of time for the bookies to price up Cross/Gurney, so I'll wait.
Next weekend is PC21 and PC22, where there seems to be basically nobody of note playing either of them. It's the one that's over in Hildesheim, and just looking at the first one there's no van Gerwen, Cross, Gurney, GAndo, Wade, Wright or ALewis from the FRH top 20. No Cadby either. That makes things super wide open, so maybe there's some decent each way value to be had on these.
While I'm not analysing the final, here's a first couple of parts in an occasional series - "If I ran the PDC":
1) Winners on the Asian Tour win an entry into a Players Championship event of their choice
This makes some sense to me. I would imagine that if you put this into play, most players who would be in a position to utilise this would either wait until they've banked a couple and play a weekend, or (and?) look to time a week to ten days where there is also Challenge Tour events or decent sized BDO opens which they can also take advantage of. The Asian Tour seems so separate in a way that other regional tours aren't, especially since the DPA tour at least has some influence in getting into the World Series. You could look to do similar for other something like the DPA tour, but I think throwing up the opportunity for an Ilagan, Malicdem, Asada etc to be able to target a time period where there's the Pro Tour midweek, play a couple of events and bookend them with the Challenge Tour or other major opens, it'd allow them to get enough darts in whereby the sunk cost of flights may be easily negated, ignoring the fact that by winning on the Asian Tour they've got a few quid in the bank anyway. Just one Pro Tour win would come close to paying for the flights in themselves.
2) PDC qualifiers for the Grand Slam are initially seeded by Grand Slam qualification countback
Again, this makes perfect sense to me. If Durrant wins tomorrow, surely it would be logical to start seeding by the last players not to make it in? So Hughes would be the #1 seed, then Clayton, Lewis, Ratajski etc? There's an effective Order of Merit for qualifying for the Slam - if you're not high enough to get in directly on it, seed the qualifier by it.
Back in the morning.
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