It's pretty uninspiring. Down one event from last year, still hugely German-dominated (while nowhere near as bad as the peak-Deutschland we had in 2017, it's still more than half the events), the Netherlands surely warrants a return to two events given the size of darts in the country (I didn't actually notice them drop to one this year to be honest, but still), we still have an event in Gib as opposed to the peninsula in general, seemingly solely to satisfy sponsor demands, what appeared to be well received events in Denmark and the Czech Republic have been binned off to add one in Hungary, home of Janos Vegso and, er, Pal Szekely and, er, er, no wait it's gone. Not the most inspiring of selections, if you're not doing Spain then surely you'd have a poke at Poland or another one of the Scandi countries where there's at least some darting pedigree or great growth. Or Ireland even, I know they have the Grand Prix but there's so much emerging talent over there that giving them one shot wouldn't be a terrible idea?
Sure, they might be able to address something with the as yet undecided twelfth spot, but I won't hold my breath. Elsewhere, they still persist in holding the Masters despite nobody giving a fuck about it, they've abandoned non-Wigan events on the Dev Tour apart from the one weekend in Hildesheim, the Challenge Tour is also always in Wigan apart from one weekend in Milton Keynes, they've expanded the main tour to Europe a little bit more with two pairs of events in Hildesheim, up from one, and one pair in whatever a Leeuwarden is, apparently it's somewhere near Groningen, and in other changes they've brought the World Series finals forward a bit and synchronised the two Q-School events, which makes a lot of sense, at least so there's no clash with
Maybe I can get to one of the Euro Tours this year. Leverkusen is nicely poised in the international break, but that looks to be about it logistically unless I tried to pin down the Dutch event. We'll see nearer the time I guess.
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