Predicting a Smith/Durrant final was more or less the kiss of death for both of them, wasn't it? Dimitri seemed to out-Glen Glen, with Dimitri not winning a single leg in four visits (in contrast to Durrant's four), instead piling in the five visit kills, slotting in a solid near-93 average in the losing legs to always be there or there abouts. Meanwhile Anderson needed a small amount of overtime to get home after it looked like Smith had done enough with a six leg burst to get the key break for 15-14 from a 14-9 deficit, but a 116 out for a twelve to level (after Smith had missed the bull to go one away) was critical, and Smith failing to get more than one treble in any visit in the final leg was enough. This was a weird one, Anderson could easily have been clear, but allowed Smith three separate breaks of throw in six visits, which at this level is really unforgivable.
As for the final, we either get Anderson defending all his money with interest (as an aside, it's pretty lol that they each got 20k for reaching the final compared to the 25k for reaching the semis), or we get a first Belgian winner of a major, which would lift Dimitri, already at an FRH ranking high of #13, up to #7 and surely a lock for the Premier League in 2021, assuming the powers that be do recognise that this is a cold that's going round and not the bubonic plague. Their stats in the Matchplay are remarkably similar - both have lost 41 legs while Gary has won 55 compared to Dimitri's 54, both are scoring 93 in winning legs (DvdB is about half a point higher) while Dimitri's doing the same in losing legs, about three points higher than Gary. Neither has been prolific in power scoring legs, only having three twelve darters a piece, both doing their damage in relentless 13-15 dart legs. Anderson doing this slightly more gives him a tiny edge on the "just Matchplay" projections at around 53/47, but Dimitri scoring more all round makes this too close to call.
What about longer samples? On both just 2020 and a full twelve months, this favours Anderson considerably - somewhere in the mid 60% range up to around a 2-1 favourite. Does this suggest a bet? Not really. Gary's 8/13, which isn't really tempting enough over the course of longer samples, factor in that Dimitri's been playing the slightly better darts over the week, and the edge that the larger dataset points to probably disappeared. As such, there's no bets to recommend, so the near 2 unit lead we had built up this year has gone and the year to date stats are down to about a quarter of a unit loss. Which is a shame, I think I'd make all the bets again, we just had a few people critically underperform.
Where we go after this is unclear - there's a great lack of action, I would have thought the PDC would have announced another series of five Pro Tours at some point in August, but there's nothing yet (maybe they are waiting until after the Matchplay), there's an intriguing to be confirmed set of Challenge Tour events in MK in mid August before the Premier League catches up, but there's nothing ranked until Hungary in September. Meanwhile in the WDF side, there's nothing scheduled until minor events in Iceland in September. So we'll probably have to do a bit more filler, we do have stuff to catch the Second/Third Division Darts up a bit, but what we do outside of that, who knows.
No comments:
Post a Comment