Challenge Tour and Development Tour

Am I the only one that's seeing a huge potential issue with the remaining Challenge Tour, Development Tour and the early rounds of the world youth being held in Barnsley? It's quite simply this - our marvellous government that is rivalling the BDO for general incompetence has put the Netherlands on the unclean list. Now for the proposed Winter Series, also intended for the UK, it's not quite so much of an issue for the PDC, as they'll surely just bubble off Milton Keynes, and it's a smaller scale so not as much of a problem. But for the Challenge Tour and Development Tour? Nobody in their right mind is going to come over for these from the Netherlands (or whatever other countries might have variance in the irrelevant stat that is coronacold cases in the coming weeks), unless they get a guarantee they can run straight down to Harwich and get the night boat home and not have to flick their plums for two weeks. I've certainly binned off the Amsterdam portion of my upcoming holiday as a result. Maybe someone like van de Wal or Konterman might punt it on the Challenge Tour, or Nijman, van Peer or Zonneveld might have a go from the Development Tour - but that's only because they're in a position to qualify for the worlds.

The PDC have to address this issue fairly sharpish. Right now, you'd have to say that with the Dev Tour weekend clashing with a Euro Tour, anyone that's on that that isn't a tour card holder from the Netherlands is surely going to drive across to Hildesheim. The Challenge Tour probably doesn't have the same problem, as their weekend clashes with the Grand Prix, so they're not going to schedule one of the two dates they're intending to squeeze in at that time, but with local events starting to open up here, surely someone in the Netherlands is going to look to play a local comp?

One thing they could look to do is to have the two things be a multi venue event. Hire a venue in the Netherlands - that place where they were going to hold a couple of Pro Tours would do. Draw things as normal, if you have a situation where you have players in different venues facing each other, you just use DartConnect to solve the scoring issue. They should be able to set up both venues to have more or less the same playing conditions.

Of course, this may all be concern over nothing, we could see half the cabinet resign due to every single decision they've made being a colossal fuck up since, ooh, mid to late March, and we get a new bunch in that recognise coronacold was never as big a crisis as feared, the initial objective of "protect the NHS" was accomplished in April, and let people do normal stuff again. But I won't hold my breath.