The ultimate Harrington visit

This is very much a fun, low content post, those expecting high value Grand Prix insights can come back tomorrow. But long term readers of the blog will know we're not fans of Rod Harrington here at Tungsten Towers. Heck, short term readers will also know if they've read the FAQ. In any case, it's not actually a name that's come up recently, until someone on X (I forget who and CBA to look through my archives, but you know who you are) highlighted that someone, I want to say Dirk, was on a simple single-double out in a recent Euro Tour, but missed a big number twice in a row to not get a dart at an out, which was described as "the ultimate Harrington visit" or words to that effect.

But no, was my retort. That would be if those two missed big numbers then left double nine, which Dirk then hits. But can we reasonably create a visit which does this? I feel we need some caveats here.

Firstly, you must be aiming at a reasonable target to set up yout outshot of choice. and it must be a reasonable outshot. Some people, like Littler with his D15 shenanigans and previous to that (the now resurgent it must be said) Mensur with D14, have pushed the boundaries of what is reasonable. Let's just have a bit of common sense. If you are on 40 and claim "going 8 for D16 and I pushed it into D11 I'm now on D9 gg" you can fuck off, you're going for tops.

Secondly, your miss must be reasonable. You might pull one into single 7 going for big 20, but nobody good is. The point is that Harrington would have a meltdown, and he's not watching your games at the Dog and Duck, and neither am I. Let's limit stuff to missing by one bed and that's it.

Finally, I think we should try to be consistent, we shouldn't really switch from being a tops and tens player to a 16s and breakdown thereof player mid visit for the purposes of getting a funnier route.

So, can we do it? Well I've got three that I think come pretty close. Making up the podium, and I think I just about prefer the first one, we have:

Requiring 41 - big 20 going for single 1, treble 1 going for single 1, double 9

Requiring 49 - big 3 going for big 17, double 14 going for single, double 9

Neither of those really do it for me - in both cases, the second visit has at least hit the number we're going for, even if we've not hit the single we wanted. However, there is one route which I think is the winner for now.

Requiring 43 - big 8 going for 11, big 17 going for 3, double 9

I think that's about the best I can come up with, looking at all the options for a second dart to leave 18, nothing else in the lead up seems to have either a legitimate neighbouring miss, or simply have a legitimate alternate target which we must go for (good job saying that hitting any form of 6 is a possibility on 24 for example).

This works, however, it still doesn't really cut the mustard for me, and for one reason. And that's the second dart. Now anyone at any level will probably have needed 35 at some point, and have been told "look if you want to leave D16 at least aim for the left side of the 3 so if you miss you still have D8" which, even at the pro level where they're missing big numbers fairly rarely (and is not only the entire point of the meme, but something someone ran some numbers on on the PDC site fairly recently), they'd probably tend towards making any misses miss left.

So can we do better? That's your challenge. Maybe there's some shank into an adjacent treble route I've completely misses or similar. Go for it. And if you are wanting Grand Prix numbers, I'm close to done with getting the players in that event up to date after PC28-30, even if I'm not close to the rest of the field, so check back later today or maybe tomorrow. I'm off work then so I should have something (which will be brief because double in format) before the off.