Post Sindelfingen update

Cross finally broke his Euro Tour duck, consigning Humphries to a fourth final defeat this year which is a pretty remarkable record, let's quickly see what that's done to the FRH rankings:

1 Michael Smith

2 Michael van Gerwen

3 Peter Wright

4 Gerwyn Price

5 Luke Humphries

6 Rob Cross

7 Nathan Aspinall

8 Jonny Clayton

9 Dirk van Duijvenbode

10 Dimitri van den Bergh

11 Danny Noppert

12 Dave Chisnall

13 Joe Cullen

14 Damon Heta

15 Ross Smith

16 Andrew Gilding

17 Ryan Searle

18 Gabriel Clemens

19 Jose de Sousa

20 Chris Dobey

Actually no changes. Cross is now right in between Humphries and Aspinall, rather than just ahead of Nathan, Heta and Smith are a lot closer to Cullen than they were, while outside Schindler and Rock are within a stone's throw of getting into the top 20. Dobey is less than 30 points behind de Sousa, while van Veen's run sees him just outside the top 70, and he'll probably be in there by the end of the week.

One thing I do want to look at is an issue of scheduling within the European Tour - I noticed that Dave Chisnall played second in the afternoon this weekend, whereas his opponent, Krzysztof Ratajski, played last in the evening. Does the additional rest make a difference? Hard to say, certainly didn't in this instance, but does it matter overall? Let's take a look at the nine events and see who's come out on top:

This seems somewhat counter intuitive - there's been 38 instances where we've had a day 2 afternoon session player go up against a day 2 evening session player in the last sixteen, and the evening session player has won 25 of them. You'd perhaps expect this, given that they typically load the evening session with the better players, and unless you get a surprise last 32 result (e.g. the Cross/Montgomery lineup from yesterday), they'd normally win more. However, to normalise for this I've projected all the games based on how the players are right now (trying to backdate the projections would be a nightmare), to try to work out how many games the evening session players should have won - and they should have won barely more than what'd be a 19-19 split! So maybe it's the case that playing in the evening is actually beneficial? I'm guessing there's just not enough sample to try to draw conclusions any one way or another, but maybe it's a case where having a longer break actually loses some momentum, and players are mentally gearing up for a four match Sunday. Who knows.