This might be a tad small, but it should give you the gist of things. The only games we have seen the bare minimum of times were the respective games between van Gerwen, Cross and Bunting, and this is despite van Gerwen withdrawing from one against Price. What is should highlight beyond anything is how many times this format has given us Littler against Humphries. It is, if we exclude the finals day, every other week.
Now, back in the old days of wrestling, a promotion would NEVER give away a match between their two top talents who they are pushing towards a pay per view major card matchup. Now clearly this is different - anyone that is paying for the subscription (at least in the UK) who has paid in for the Premier League is going to be getting the Matchplay as well. But this sort of thing just will naturally harm the potential draw rate. How on earth can they possibly try to do any sort of billing of their dream Luke on Luke violence final as "the final we've all been waiting for" when due to the ridiculous Premier League format, they have given this game away NINE TIMES already this season? It goes the same for more or less anything between these players - they are clearly not the top eight players in the world, but the PDC clearly see these players as at least marketable if not. Why should us, as keyboard warriors (sorry, punters), give a shit if we get Aspinall against van Gerwen in the Matchplay when you've given this to us six times already?
It gets worse when you expand to other televised events. Let's go through what we've seen from events we can see. I'm going to include the European Tour, as we can see all of those. I'm not going to include the Pro Tour, as while a lot of the games between these players will take place when there is a high probability of these coming against each other, it's not guaranteed and I'm pretty sure nobody is tracking it. So let's go through event by event.
World Masters - Nothing miraculously
UK Open - Bunting/Dobey
Bahrain - Littler/Price, Humphries/Aspinall, Humphries/Bunting, Price/Bunting, Dobey/Bunting
Dutch - Littler/van Gerwen, Littler/Bunting, Price/Cross, Cross/Bunting
Nordic - Littler/Aspinall, Humphries/Price, Aspinall/Bunting, Price/Cross, Dobey/Cross, Cross/Bunting
ET1 - No games
ET2 - Humphries/Aspinall, Price/van Gerwen
ET3 - Humphries/Bunting, Aspinall/Price, Aspinall/Bunting
ET4 - No games
ET5 - No games
ET6 - No games
ET7 - No games
ET8 - Aspinall/Dobey
So, a bunch of the additional games have come from the World Series events, and not so much from the Euro Tours - mainly because a lot of players in the PL have either not entered or withdrawn from the tournaments in question. What that does to the cross table is this:
It's not a huge change, but it tells us enough - apart from two matches, we have seen everyone who got to the PL finals day against anyone else in the PL at least four times already this season, barring two matchups.
So what can we do about it? The first thing would be a reversion to the previous PL format. Increase back to 10, and go to an actual league format - the strength in depth is there regardless of who you pick, the cut down to 8 after 9 weeks does add jeopardy which frankly is not there in the current format, and you only see every game twice, plus whoever plays each other in the finals night. You never go into an event thinking "well I saw these two last week". Only three weeks didn't see some sort of rematch from the previous week. Increase the field, limit the number of times people play each other, it increases variety. Secondly, they really need to go back to what they used to do probably nearly a decade ago now, and use toe World Series as kind of a proving ground for those players who are on the up, but who they might not quite see as Premier League ready. Looking at the line ups they have had so far, in Bahrain they had 7 PL players plus Wright (van Gerwen not there), all 8 in the Netherlands, and then 7 PL players plus Clayton in Copenhagen (again, van Gerwen not there). Now I guess for the Wright inclusion there may have been some pressure on the PDC to include certain players, and I don't hate the inclusion of Clayton given he's had a good season, but they are hardly the future of the sport. Why on earth are we not just having 3, 4, 5 of the Premier League line up and some real wild cards in there? Why are we not giving Josh Rock a shot? Gian van Veen? Wessel Nijman? Damon Heta? Martin Schindler? Mike de Decker? Granted, some of these may end up as jobbers to the stars in the relevant events, but why? Plenty of them have done enough, are playing well enough and are young enough that they may be on the cusp of going stratospheric if things go their way in the next six months. Wouldn't you want to see how they handle themselves on a huge stage against the best in the world?
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