GOLD

Holy fucking shit Andrew Gilding is a major champion, not a sentence I thought I'd be saying any time soon, if ever, but without ever playing spectacularly (certainly not with the heights he had during his previous semi final run in any case) he just hung in there when needed and took his chances, which is all he really needed to do. Huge result, also a pretty massive performance from Adam Gawlas to make the semi final which should see him securely inside the top 64 at the end of the year. Also great runs from Schindler, who continues to push up towards the top 20, and Richie Burnett as well, while Richie will still need to do some work to retain his card beyond 2023, he is at least in a decent position to do so, will still probably need to make the worlds, but there's a chance. A few disappointing early exits for many players in and around the 10-25 FRH ranking brackets, although as we did see there were a lot of high profile draws in round four, so this is the sort of thing that can always happen.

New FRH rankings:

1 Michael Smith

2 Michael van Gerwen

3 Peter Wright

4 Gerwyn Price

5 Luke Humphries

6 Nathan Aspinall

7 Rob Cross

8 Dimitri van den Bergh (UP 1)

9 Danny Noppert (DOWN 1)

10 Jonny Clayton

11 Dirk van Duijvenbode

12 Joe Cullen

13 Dave Chisnall

14 Ross Smith

15 Ryan Searle

16 Damon Heta

17 Gabriel Clemens

18 Andrew Gilding (NEW)

19 Jose de Sousa (DOWN 1)

20 Chris Dobey (DOWN 1)

Wade drops off the top 20. Dimi's semi sees the only other top 20 move, Schindler's quarter sees him up to #24, Gawlas is up inside the top 45 now, while Burnett is up to #72.

It's a busy couple of weeks coming up - there's Players Championships both of the next two weekends, the second bunch being a funky double header in Germany right after they have four Challenge Tours (I suppose that kind of makes sense if you think about it), this weekend we've also got more SDC action, the Asian Tour returns for the first time since forever, while next weekend also sees the Isle of Man event, which seems downgraded from previous years, but oh well.

As an aside, would it surprise you if I told you that Brendan Dolan and Adrian Lewis are outside of Matchplay qualification spots right now? Or that de Sousa and Ratajski are provisionally out of the Grand Prix (as is, for that matter, Gilding)?