Winmau World Masters Day 1

Posted: 26.09.17 in Tournament Analysis Blog category

Seeds get the treatment at The Spa!

If the seeds thought they could turn up at The Spa and be pampered by the plucky qualifiers they were mistaken! We look at where it all went wrong!

There has been a tweak in the format for this year’s Winmau World Masters. As long as I have been involved behind the scenes, this is my 4th I think, the Last 32 Men’s games were played, one at a time on stage.

This year the qualifiers battled it out until there were 16 Men and 8 Ladies left standing and then they had to play the seeds for a place on stage today!

Now whenever there is a significant change in format, rules or equipment in any sport you have to look and try and work out the implications. In cricket for example when helmets were introduced it was welcomed as a huge benefit when it comes to the safety of players, although tragically not 100% fool-proof.

However, the protection of the helmet then led to batsmen producing more and more outrageous shots as they no longer had to be concerned about a split lip or black eye from missing a ball. So back to the Spa and we had a situation where we had 24 players that had the chance to acclimatise to the conditions at the tournament, had 4 or 5 games under their belt and were warmed up and ready to play.

The seeds on the other hand wandered in a couple of hours before the event, had limited practice time and then had to play a vital one-off qualifier. Some seeds, 9 out of 16 went out and (after they had lost) made it quite clear how they felt about having what they perceived as a disadvantage. But, was it really the format’s fault?

My own opinion is that the players perhaps either under-estimated how hard this was going to be for them and what I can say with more certainty is that they had no plans in place to try and claw back some of the advantage the warmed up players had got. Whatever you think about that it does demonstrate how proper planning is crucial and I can’t tell you what my advice would have been as I may need it in the future to help one of our players if they ask for assistance!

One man who will not be complaining about the advantages or disadvantages is Scotland's Alan Soutar. He came through the qualifiers and plays today. He also coupled his qualification with looking after some of his lads from the Angus Darts Academy. We were one of the sponsors who answered Alan's call to sponsor a patch to help towards the cost of bringing the guys down. Nathan Girvan is wearing our patch and he got to the semi finals-a fantastic achievment!

But advantage or not it made for a day of high drama and there will be more of that today. The action starts at 2pm. First up we have the Girls' and Boys' Finals, the WDDA Event followed by the Ladies ¼ Finals:

Deta Hedman v Sarah Roberts 
Corrine Hammond v Mikuru Suzuki
Lorraine Winstanley v Anastasia Dobromyslova 
Trina Gulliver v Tricia Wright

All these games can be watched on Winmau TV.

From 6pm it is the Men’s Last 16:

McGeeney v Duff
Greebe v Philips 
Montgomery v Hurrell
Landman v Clemens

O’Shea v Williams
McGrath v Menzies
Ratajski v Soutar 
Duijster v Durrant

All these games can be seen on Winmau TV or Eurosport

Odds

Men’s

Glen Durrant is 5/4 Favourite! McGeeney 8/1 Montgomery 9/1 Jim Williams 12/1 James Hurrell 14/1 Martin Phillips 16/1

Ladies

Deta 6/4 Anastasia 5/2 Lorraine Winstanley 11/2 Corrine Hammond 6/1 Trina Gulliver 7/1

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