Premier League 13 - Sixth League Day, Manchester
It's A Funny Old Game
Week 6 of the Premier League, we discuss if 6 points is enough to stay up and check out our forecasts for this week!
. What a night of Premier league action last week! Touted as relegation fodder and bottom of the league Jackpot looked a little bit more like the champion he is and pulled off a victory against the odds and against the man of the moment, Mighty Mike. Plus, in the match of the night, for excitement anyway, Barney demonstrated his more often than not hidden mental toughness to win a deciding leg against Andy Hamilton to secure victory. The Hammer's reward for his excellent performance, albeit a losing one, and his 100 average was to be installed as second favourite to take one of the relegations spots! As I said, darts is a funny old game!The 9 week mini league that will end with two players getting their Premier League P45's is causing a lot of debate, and why not. It is a tremendous innovation by the PDC. Six points was discussed as a safety zone, this brings The Hammer, The Wizard, Anderson (all on 4 points), The Warrior (3 points)and of course Lewis (2 points) into the relegation equation.
Six points is going to be enough for safety I reckon, just, although there may be some leg difference needed too! Just look at recent history of the Premier League. In 2009, Klassen and Mardle had 4 points after 9 matches, in 2010 Jenkins 4 and Barney 5 points were bottom of the heap as were Webster and Jenkins with the same tally of points in 2011. Last year Anderson, Painter and Hamilton were all tied on 6 at the end of 9 matches.
On the other side of the coin qualification is still possible for all the players looking over their shoulder at the trap door. In the last three seasons thirteen points (twice) and fourteen points were enough to get the last qualification place for the play offs! Each player still has 18 points to compete for (if they can avoid the drop) and after last week with The Power and The Thorn losing their unbeaten tags it is going to be a fascinating battle.
Tips
Simon Whitlock repaid the faith we had in him by beating Wez 7:5. We will steer clear of The Wizard this week as he is up against my man of the Premier League so far, James Wade.Taylor didn't produce on the 180's though (hitting two, again) to ruin our new slimmer dart/more 180's theory. I did see enough though not to give up on this theory entirely though. One unusual part of Taylor's game was on at least three occasions he appeared to miscalculate the distance of the darts from his hand as he retrieved them from the board and fumbled them as he collected them up. Maybe it was the lighting or perhaps The Power's specs may make a return soon?
We are not going to put Taylor's vision off our first tip and we are looking at The Power and The Hammer to put in one decent checkout between them. They have a 152, 127 and a 120 between them so far this season. We reckon the battle of the Stokies fuelled by Hamilton's victory at the weekend tournament over Taylor should be enough to inspire either of them to overcome the over 118.5 checkout line on offer at 5/6. Take this as it brings the 120 into the equation, the rest go over 120.5.
Whilst we are on the subject of checkouts the Newton V Van Gerwen match caught my attention. Both players have had a polar opposite Premier League experience thus far but Wez has actually out scored Might Mike four weeks out of the five in their best checkout scores. MVG hitting a best of 104 and then next is his 64 on match day 4. Newton hasn't exactly been prolific (131, 71, 70, 65 and 57) but has consistently achieved higher checkout scores than MVG. Bet365 offer a slightly speculative 6/4 for Wez to make it five out of six.