Very tempted by King there. We can get 6/4, which is probably a decent play, Heta's a favourite but it's a much smaller one than that. I just don't have the confidence that Mervyn will be able to convert given just how solid a match player Damon is.
Wright/Smith is a similar line, but the difference here is Peter is a bit more of a favourite than Damon is. It's only around 55/45, as such there's not much to think about.
Cullen I thought might have been worth the punt when I saw that he was around 9/4, but he really isn't - the model is saying 70/30, so no bet again.
Then we have another 70/30 to finish between MvG and DvD. We can get a bit better odds on Dirk, just the right side of 3/1 on Paddy Power, but I just feel that he's going to relatively underperform.
As such, no bets. Yesterday was a bit of a disappointment - van Gerwen covered some of the defeats but I have no idea where a scoreline in the Woodhouse match came from. Dirk winning was something I thought to be perfectly reasonable, but 10-1? Jesus. Humphries was hanging around but just got done by a good Price spurt after the final break, while Rydz did himself proud to force a final leg, it's just a shame he had two really poor visits (the 38 in turn 3, then the trainwreck on 164), Peter gave him the chance and he didn't get a dart at a double.
We now know a fair bit more about the worlds now, and the news really isn't great. Let's go through one by one (I think I've mentioned the Chinese winner already):
- Ilagan won the Philippines qualifier. This is fine.
- Paul Lim won the Hong Kong qualifier. This is also fine.
- Kantele has replaced Viljanen from the Nordic/Baltic tour list as the latter has withdrawn for health reasons, this is fine and we hope Kim is well.
- Toru Suzuki has won the Japanese qualifier. I don't know who he is. He seemed to average around 83 on the Asian Tour last year, so may not be a complete bunny, but averaged mid-70's in the semi and under 70 in the final. Oops.
- Portela has got a South American invite, this is fine as he at least plays PDC events and has some level of competence.
- Some Indian player that isn't Nitin Kumar got an invite. I don't know the internal politics of Indian darts but from what I've read on Twitter from Kumar and others it's a bit of a joke. He's seemingly played the World Cup years ago and also was young enough to play the Dev Tour in 2018 (apparently he's 25), so at least he's youngish?
- Then we've got the PDPA qualifier. Less than 24 hours after Uncle Barry said there'll just be two spots, there are, er, six, and it's split between four UK and two rest of world. Now if you really can't plug some of the gaps (would it be too hard to invite a bunch of Irish players to play online, or Dutch for that matter?), then fine, but either do an open draw, or to maintain the international quota, have everyone eligible for four spots then for all the international players that don't make it, have two more.
That's about it. Will be back before the semis.
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