Saturday, 10 August 2019

Denis Ovens wins World Series title - wait, what?

Damon Heta - oh wow, that's incredible. Great job. Taking out Wade, GAndo, Whitlock and Cross is a stupidly tough run and he's managed to do it. With him looking in pole position to get a worlds spot through the DPA tour, and surely getting to wherever the World Series finals are, his game is surely going to be on the up and up, he's only 32 and there's plenty of time for him to take the shot at Q-School and the tour if he wants to.

But here's another "if I ran the PDC" occasional post on that point, and it's a bit of an adaptation of point 1:

4) Tour Card 128 is a "card share" card

I'm sure plenty of us have worked in places where there's a flexible policy in relation to working practices, and in recognition of that people have skills that you'd like to use, but don't necessarily have the ability to commit to something full time, can work around this and split their role across two people. Why can't this work for darts? Let's face facts - the entirety of the PDC ranking schedule takes place in Europe, with a large proportion of that taking place in the United Kingdom. That's a fucking long way away from a lot of darting cultures, and it takes an enormous commitment to come half way around the world to ply your trade in Barnsley and Wigan for two years.

So why not build something in to the tour card system whereby you can give players like Heta (and, previously, the likes of Kyle Anderson, Cody Harris etc) the opportunity to get into Players Championship events, and anything else that may be available to them, for a shorter time period? You've got 30 Players Championship events - offer 5 players the opportunity to reside in the UK for a 6 event run and also allow them carte blanche to play the Challenge Tour, Euro Tour qualifiers, and any other non-PDC events that might be available to them. This'd be targeted at the elite of the rest of the world that might be thinking about giving the tour a go, but were unsure - you'd be situated where you'd be for a month, six weeks, two months dependent on the exact schedule. That ought to give you a solid enough idea as to whether you can acclimatise to a different country, culture, perhaps language. If you do alright on and off the board, you'd be a lot more confident about making the commitment to try to get on the tour - failing that, you'd certainly gain a lot of experience which will surely translate to your home circuit and, as a result, improve the game across the world in general.

It's a Challenge Tour weekend - we've had wins for Cameron Menzies and Patrick Lynskey - we know both of them, more about Menzies for sure, but Patrick did make a final earlier in the year and that pushes him decently up the rankings - not sure exactly how far, but if he can do some damage tomorrow then who knows?

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