Monday, 19 October 2020

No way

Jose actually did it! de Sousa binks the title, with it a probable Grand Slam spot (hard to see how he doesn't get in really), and in some style with a 105+ average in the final over the world number 1. Very nice. And in other great news, Deta Hedman was able to get into the worlds (along with Lisa Ashton) from the Women's Series. Hearn must be gutted that Sherrock isn't in. We also saw Boris Krcmar get through his regional qualifier, who'll surely be one for the Pro Tour list to avoid (although as a whole the international list is looking extremely strong as a whole), someone I've never heard of won the Chinese qualifier, of course where the worlds is held is the biggest question right now.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael van Gerwen
2 Peter Wright
3 Gerwyn Price
4 Rob Cross
5 Dimitri van den Bergh
6 Nathan Aspinall (UP 1)
7 Glen Durrant (UP 1)
8 Michael Smith (DOWN 2)
9 Dave Chisnall
10 Daryl Gurney
11 Gary Anderson
12 Ian White (UP 1)
13 James Wade (DOWN 1)
14 Krzysztof Ratajski
15 Mensur Suljovic
16 Simon Whitlock
17 Joe Cullen (UP 1)
18 Jonny Clayton (DOWN 1)
19 Adrian Lewis
20 Chris Dobey

Smith drops a couple primarily because of his results being more backloaded than Aspinall or Durrant (e.g. his worlds final), although Nathan did need to reach the quarters to get up the two spots. White's semi final moves him above Wade, although a quarter would have been enough, Clayton not qualifying was enough to put him below Cullen.

Lower down, de Sousa reaches a new high of 27, Labanauskas is still hanging around just outside the top 40 after a good run to the quarter finals, Maik Kuivenhoven is up into the top 80 and with him now seemingly locked into the European Championship, stands a great chance of retaining his card, Kleermaker is just a couple of spots behind him. With their first round wins, new card holders Scott Waites and Derk Telnekes have hit the top 100. It's also a sad day in that, now two years after their last cashes, Terry Jenkins and Richie Burnett get taken off the main list.

We head to Riesa next. There's plenty of speculation as to how many players will see that they've got a Euros spot booked and drop out - certainly a possibility. Only time will tell, but it's probably going to be one that domestic qualifiers won't want to miss, although as Kim Huybrechts said on Twitter, maybe they ought to look to rebalance where there's a lot of dropouts opening up existing spots to the qualifiers. At least keep it the same ratio - if three spots come up, give two to the home nations and one to the affiliate. Of course, Kim's brother playing in the associate quali would have nothing to do with it, and they've already played the event for ET4 anyway, so there's not much they can really do. Something to think about for next year, although 2021 surely won't be as much of a clusterfuck as 2020 has been.

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