Bit of a roundup

So there's been a few things going on in the world of darts since the Matchplay finished - we had the Euro Tour qualifiers yesterday, and there was a few interesting names making it through. Brett Claydon doing the double came out of nowhere I guess, just looking at ET11 first we saw Simon Stevenson break Steve Beaton's streak, Scott Taylor made it through as an associate, will be good to see how Ryan Meikle's developing, similar with Bradley Brooks I guess, while in the Euro side Maik Kuivenhoven is a little bit of a surprise qualifier. Tom Lonsdale was only a leg away from making it, which would have been a bit of a coup. In ET12, the Euro half was mostly the usual, but Davy van Baelen made it, as did Benito van de Pas, how odd. The UK qualifier saw a lot of names who've been playing a bit better than results suggest qualifying - Luke Woodhouse, Arron Monk, Kyle Anderson, Adam Hunt, Willie O'Connor, Steve West - would have added Jamie Hughes prior to ET8 obviously. Richard North also qualified, which is a useful bit of form after a pretty awful 2019 to date.

BDO news, and they've announced venues for the World Masters and Lakeside - I say Lakeside, as it's not Lakeside, it's at the smaller venue in the O2, which I think it somewhat of a positive move. Bringing it right into London can only attract more attention, it's a decent venue, sure there's some doom-merchants saying "it's not Lakeside BDO is dead" but I think it was time for a change. As for the Masters, they're going to the Circus Tavern. That's an interesting one, obviously it's no stranger to darts (although, oddly, the BDO press release just refers to it as "hosting tournaments, exhibitions") and it's also good that they've tied it down for three years. It's hugely important for the BDO to have a bit of stability and I think this accomplishes it.

PC21's going on, I find it incredible that after Gerwyn Price's late withdrawal (I at least knew about it yesterday from Twitter, when he actually alerted the PDC is another question at least) that they couldn't find a replacement. Hildesheim's not exactly in the arse end of nowhere, Hannover, Braunschweig, Wolfsburg, Kassel, Bielefeld (if it even exists) are all fairly close and you've got to think that there's surely one German player with associate PDPA membership that could have hopped in his car and not given Ian White a bye. Or, for that matter, any of the other associates that made up the field for the Euro Tour qualifiers. They didn't all just do a runner, surely?