van Gerwen's back!

Pretty dominating performance in that final after Cross got ahead early. Didn't put a foot wrong to run off all those legs, can't do anything realistically in the one he lost given Cross held in four visits. The game hadn't massively gone away, it was just not getting results. Now it's got a result, this could be an ominous return to form. Shame Wright dropped out at the quarter final stages, was looking forward to that one, but he's got to put the longer term picture in play, and if he's not right you don't want to aggravate anything.

Good to see Cross back in a final, still seems a little bit odd he's not actually won a Euro Tour yet. Same with Dimitri I suppose, would think it'll be a decent bet that one of them binks one at some point this season.

New FRH rankings:

1 Peter Wright

2 Gerwyn Price

3 Michael Smith

4 Michael van Gerwen (UP 1)

5 James Wade (DOWN 1)

6 Jonny Clayton

7 Rob Cross (UP 1)

8 Gary Anderson (DOWN 1)

9 Jose de Sousa

10 Danny Noppert

11 Joe Cullen

12 Dimitri van den Bergh

13 Ryan Searle

14 Krzysztof Ratajski

15 Luke Humphries

16 Dave Chisnall

17 Nathan Aspinall

18 Dirk van Duijvenbode

19 Mervyn King

20 Damon Heta

MvG's less than 2k ahead of Wade, so I don't think that van Gerwen will stay ahead of James by this time next week assuming they all play. Cross was fairly close to pulling ahead of Anderson anyway, but the final gives him a solid cushion. Maybe a little bit surprising that no other moves happened, Dimitri's now closer to Cullen than Searle, as opposed to the other way round, but that's about it really. Gurney's edged up one place following his semi, while Karel Sedlacek regains the Czech number one spot by one place over Adam Gawlas.

I'm going to go back over the Isle of Man stream and try to pull some stats for the latter stages, it seemed solid enough so should be able to get some data. But for now, here's another little stat for you, it's a power ranking sort of thing - best scoring from the last 180 days, minimum 180 legs played criteria. I'll give you the top 32 - let me know who surprises you:

1 Michael van Gerwen

2 Gerwyn Price

3 Chris Dobey

4 Peter Wright

5 Damon Heta

6 Jonny Clayton

7 Michael Smith

8 Nathan Aspinall

9 Rob Cross

10 Dimitri van den Bergh

11 Callan Rydz

12 Gary Anderson

13 Dirk van Duijvenbode

14 Luke Humphries

15 Daryl Gurney

16 Ryan Searle

17 Krzysztof Ratajski

18 Stephen Bunting

19 Dave Chisnall

20 Karel Sedlacek

21 Danny Noppert

22 Joe Cullen

23 Martin Schindler

24 Ross Smith

25 Brendan Dolan

26 James Wade

27 Raymond van Barneveld

28 Jose de Sousa

29 Adrian Lewis

30 Kim Huybrechts

31 Ian White

32 Mensur Suljovic