Quite a few events on to note, van Gerwen went out of the first round of that exbo to Clayton in what would have been something the model would have jumped all over if it weren't a friendly, but let's skip that. UK Open qualifiers are in full flow, Jason Heaver won the first last weekend but it's all about Fallon Sherrock again, who won one of them yesterday, along with Adam Huckvale, who's not had a bad couple of weeks at all following finalling a Challenge Tour, Jamie Clark, who won one in Scotland and didn't have a bad Q-School or first Challenge Tour weekend but is relatively unknown, which leaves Kelvin Self, who if dartsdatabase is to be believed has been around forever, but played 2017-18 on the Challenge Tour without doing a massive amount.
First weekend of the DPA tour took place, with Gordon Mathers, Robbie King and Kyle Anderson claiming titles - Kyle's the only tour card holder that isn't playing the first weekend of the Pro Tour, maybe spending a bit of time back home is what he needs right now.
Then of course, we have the Dutch Open - it's Brian Raman against Ross Montgomery in the final, pretty poor showing from the Dutch who couldn't get anyone into the quarters (although they do have both the ladies finalists), watched Ross' semi final against Warren, Wayne being able to hit a few 180's and check out nicely enough but simply couldn't score with any consistency, and rage threw what could have been the last dart after yanking one at tops into single one, but Ross briefly let him back in before breaking to claim the final set 3-1. Annoyingly, they only had a limited amount of boards with Dart Connect, so it's only complete from the quarters onwards, unless some stats show up elsewhere, and it was cheeky of them to put the semis in a separate "men's set play" section, making me think they weren't doing the final session on account of it being on TV anyway. Whoops for me.
What do we have this month? Premier League starts but I don't care about that - packed series of Pro Tour events, with two events each of the first three weekends before the first Euro Tour in Belgium - will be interesting to see who the qualifiers will be, with de Decker getting a card, he can't be the hot favourite. Will Vandenboegarde play? Can Ronny Huybrechts get things together and do enough to win through? Can Raman claim a title this week and then get into the PDC event at the end of the month? I'm really interested to see who turns up and plays. There's also a Development Tour weekend that very same weekend, sigh, there's only so many weekends to play in but it does annoy me a little bit whenever that happens. Meanwhile on the WDF scene, there's the Scottish Open on the 15th-16th, as well as a couple of smaller events in Slovakia, whether they're actually tracked anywhere we can get information from is a different question. We'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment