Clayton's managed to get the final Premier League spot by taking the Masters by beating King in the final. Full marks to anyone that managed to get that straight forecast, this is the sort of great result that I'm happy for Jonny for, but at the same time it takes away yet another player from the "bet at will because people don't think he's as good as he is" list. What that's done is finalised the Second and Third Division Darts rosters - based on what I listed here, we have these players:
Second Division - Wade, White, Humphries, Chisnall, M Smith, Ratajski, Cullen, Petersen, Heta, Searle
Third Division - Payne, de Zwaan, Brooks, van Duijvenbode, Brown, Hopp, Hunt, Barry, Rydz, Lennon
When will be seeing them first? At the end of this month, as the PDC today have announced that they'll have three blocks of four Pro Tour events, the first in Bolton, then one in Milton Keynes and one in Niedernhausen. Should get 12 events in the bank pretty quickly, I suppose the big question is how they backfill these events if players (say, Kyle Anderson for one) aren't able to play. There's no Challenge Tour list, so what will they do? Look at the Q-School rankings?
Which is also what they're going to do with the UK Open to fill up the spots that won't be there for Rileys' qualifiers. This kind of sucks to be honest - now obviously because of government "murder everyone" policy, they can't actually be held, but couldn't the PDC have used what they've learned from the Home Tour and collaborate with others that have held online events, and give, say, eight spots to an amateur online qualifier? I'm pretty sure that would be feasible and they've got the time to work things out in such a way to minimise the chances of cheating, and keep somewhat of the amateur ethos that makes the tournament special. It's still going to be my favourite event of the season, make no doubt about it, but without the fun of working out who the hell a bunch of random players are, it's not quite the same.
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