Still, it's Chizzy that gets a third Euro Tour of the season, playing pretty nicely in the run up to major season, he'll be one who seeds want to avoid later today as the Grand Prix draw will be made. Humphries continues to accumulate prize money in this tour, as the two of them look mortal locks for the 1/2 seeding in some order (Luke would need to bink to beat Chizzy, but he can certainly bink these). Also in the hat will be Luke Woodhouse, just scraping home over the incredibly unfortunate Gian van Veen on countback. Gian's time will come, he's basically getting to the Euro championship guaranteed unless there's the most unlikely of unlikely binks, may well be he's mathematically guaranteed already but I'm not doing the maths. Also obviously in the Grand Slam. Pleased for Luke though, he's been hovering in and around getting to one of these for what seems like half a decade and he's there now. Also good to see Scott Williams making a bit of a resurgence, that prize money should make him pretty safe for the worlds which was looking a bit marginal four days ago. The actual field for the Euros is looking fairly set, oddly enough - it's probably down to Dobey or Beaton for the last spot, Chris needing a win to get in, which in a round one field you'd say he'd be favoured to do, but then we said Pietreczko was favoured to reach round two this weekend and we saw what happened there. Anyone else outside is needing a quarter at least - Slevin needs a quarter, Soutar, Joyce, Mansell, Evans and Lukeman need a semi, and you don't feel that any of them are playing well enough right now to achieve that. Of course, plenty can happen with the seedings - wouldn't take too much shuffling to get us the Rock v van Veen first round tie we all dream of.
New FRH rankings:
1 Michael Smith
2 Michael van Gerwen
3 Nathan Aspinall
4 Luke Humphries
5 Gerwyn Price
6 Jonny Clayton
7 Peter Wright
8 Dave Chisnall (UP 4)
9 Dirk van Duijvenbode
10 Rob Cross (DOWN 2)
11 Joe Cullen
12 Danny Noppert (DOWN 2)
13 Damon Heta (UP 1)
14 Dimitri van den Bergh (DOWN 1)
15 Andrew Gilding
16 Ross Smith
17 Ryan Searle
18 Josh Rock
19 Chris Dobey
20 Gabriel Clemens
Dave's now into the top eight, which raises the question - is he in Premier League contention? Well, maybe - his playstyle certainly suits it, and three Euro Tours are not a bad haul, but as we saw with Humphries last year they don't really give a shit about how many Euro Tours you win. Chizzy probably needs to do something on TV to make the case, losing in his first matches of the TV events so far to van Gerwen and Anderson is kind of unfortunate draws, but he can't use that excuse when we get to the Euros. Cross is within a grand of Dirk and only slides down slightly given different prize distribution ages, similarly with Noppert although Cullen has a slightly bigger gap. Heta did just enough to overtake Dimitri, albeit only just, although Dimi's pretty awful results since the Matchplay indicate that shouldn't be reversed any time soon. de Decker enters the top 32 following his quarter final, Woodhouse gained a couple of places pushing for the same bracket, Rowby's decent run sees him back into the top 40, while Williams is only just outside. Finally, van Veen has dumped Mervyn King out of the top 50, and it's going to take something unusual to reverse either of those any time soon with King being nowhere near making the worlds at this point in time.
We've got a trio of Players Championship events in Barnsley coming up this week, which will give us our last data points before Leicester, so check back early next week for thoughts on today's draw. Real life's too busy to get anything out before early next week, but I've got next Monday off work so that should give me the time needed.
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