Gib done

One of our five picks to be a new Euro Tour winner actually became a Euro Tour winner! Incredible! That makes it up to two correct picks that we made in January (three if you could saying Noppert would win a Euro Tour and he then went one better and binked a major). Heta got the bink, a bit fortunate in the final with missed doubles, but a win is a win and it gives him a nice boost up both the rankings and the Euro Tour finals seedings, all the way up to number 5 behind just Humphries, MvG, Wright and Cross. Not bad, we knew he had the talent, now it's translated to a title.

New FRH rankings:

1 Peter Wright

2 Michael van Gerwen

3 Gerwyn Price

4 Michael Smith

5 Danny Noppert

6 Rob Cross

7 Luke Humphries

8 Nathan Aspinall

9 Jonny Clayton

10 James Wade

11 Dimitri van den Bergh

12 Jose de Sousa

13 Joe Cullen

14 Ryan Searle

15 Damon Heta (UP 1)

16 Dirk van Duijvenbode (DOWN 1)

17 Dave Chisnall

18 Krzysztof Ratajski

19 Gary Anderson

20 Callan Rydz

Not a huge amount of movement, but Heta had a fair bit of a jump to make, and I would expect him to get past Searle moderately soon. Aspinall's recent money is bringing him up near to both Humphries and Cross, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him pass them both with a moderately good series of performances at a four game span of Pro Tours starting later this week.

Lower down, Clemens making a quarter pushes him up to #23, Rock is now inside the top 60, and will surely be within the top 50 in due course.

We're now getting to the business end of the season - we're getting a bunch of players clinch world championship spots with Ben Robb, Diogo Portela and some Ukrainian guy locking up places, Robert Owen and Danny van Trijp got high enough in the Challenge Tour with Scott Williams looking safe through the Pro Tour, it's definitely getting close. There's some tasty ties in the European Championship - Ratajski just sneaking in to play Humphries after qualifying thanks to a win by, er, Luke Humphries ought to be good, Aspinall/Rock seems like an immediate highlight, van Gerwen/Dobey is usually value, and there's a lot of games which look like they should be competitive.

Another weekend sadly with a WDF event with zero coverage on Dart Connect or similar. It sounds like Darren Johnson won one, but who knows.