Tuesday 5 January 2021

2020 Year End Rankings


That looks to fit in the template. Looks like the highest ranked player from last year that isn't there this year is Richard North.

We should work out the Second and Third Division Darts competitors I guess. This is complicated by not knowing the tenth competitor, which we won't know until after the Masters, which they've extended to 24 players because reasons (I suppose if they need to rent a venue with a bunch of additional costs, then getting an extra session worth of ad revenue is fine). So I'm going to make a bunch of conditionals, in the likely event that someone I've picked gets called up to the main event, and list in brackets who would be the next entrant in line. As such, here we go:

Division 2

On last season's second division rankings: James Wade, Ian White (Krzysztof Ratajski)
On last season's third division rankings: Luke Humphries (Danny Noppert)
On year end FRH rankings: Dave Chisnall, Michael Smith, Krzysztof Ratajski, Joe Cullen (Daryl Gurney)
Wildcard one: Devon Petersen (highest ranked player in scoring not selected, Euro Tour winner)
Wildcard two: Damon Heta (second highest ranked player in scoring not selected, Pro Tour winner, dominant first year)
Wildcard three: Jonny Clayton (World Cup winner, top 20 in FRH ranking, third highest ranked player in scoring not selected)
(Wildcard four: Ryan Searle (rapidly improving, strong season and scoring))

Division 3

On last season's third division rankings: Josh Payne, Jeffrey de Zwaan (Ted Evetts)
World Youth Champion: Bradley Brooks
On year end FRH rankings: Dirk van Duijvenbode, Keegan Brown, Max Hopp, Adam Hunt (Steve Lennon)
Wildcard one: Keane Barry (winner of pretty much everything relevant at youth level, very solid senior record already)
Wildcard two: Callan Rydz (extremely high scoring at senior level, also now picking results up)
Wildcard three: Steve Lennon (highest ranked player not already selected, top calibre scoring, plenty of experience for this level)
(Wildcard four: Ryan Meikle (Development Tour winner, scoring not quite at the level of others selected as wildcards))

I think that covers all bases, I'll confirm the lineups in a results page once we know the tenth Premier League player. I could probably have waited until later this month, but wanted to get stuff down on "paper". Third division was tricky, we lost a bunch of players hitting 30 this year (Noppie was literally less than a week away from an auto berth), but I think the lineup looks alright. I'd like to find a way to dump Hopp and get Meikle in for sure, but I can't really do that, and I don't think that Meikle has done enough to outweigh what Rydz and Lennon have done at senior level, and Barry was only one place behind him on the Dev Tour, and I think clearly has a ton more potential.

Not sure what they're going to do in terms of calendar. The PDC that is. They've already said they're pushing the Premier League back until April at the earliest, which makes sense as I think they really need to have fans in attendance, even if it's a bit limited in the early stages. By that stage, any sort of restrictions should be an untenable position to have, but then again, us entering round three of the government murdering the economy as well as the populace isn't a tenable position either, so meh. I would guess that they have a Spring Series to get something like four Pro Tours in the bank soon after Q-School and have as many Euro Tour qualification events on one day as they can manage? It's equally odd that the current PDC calendar has the UK Open listed at the normal time of year, i.e. early March. How the hell are they going to have any sort of qualifiers for that?

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