Winmau World Masters 3
The Ladies (and the youth)
On Saturday beside the Last 16 of the men the quarterfinals of the ladies were played. This year to Japanese had managed to reach the quarterfinals - to be sure for the first time in the history of the tournament. It is a pity they ended there as well. I had a look at the list of the female Winmau World Masters winners and it doesn't look much different from this of the men. In the early years of the tournament there was a winner from New Zealand, a Lilian Barnett but I couldn't find out anything else about her. 1991 The American Sandy Reitan won the tournament. At this time she was one of the top players and a former number 1 of the world. She earned such a lot of money with darts she was a professional player - something of what till today most female players (and in fact most men as well) can only dream... After that from 2006 - 2008 Francis Hoenselaar and Karin Krappen were the Dutch winners and 2014 we had with Anastasia Dobromyslova a winner from Russia. But she lives for a long time already in England and has an English husband. So the ladies winners list is dominated by UK players as much as the men's.
I of course had a look at the youth winners as well though the youth final was already over and really -
the lists look very much the same. Only in the boys list there are more Dutch winners as in the other list while till no never a Dutch
girl won the title. And this year's result is exactly like this - the girl's tournament was won by a girl from England and the boy's
tournament by a boy from the Netherlands...
But back to the quarterfinals of the ladies and the men's last 16 on Saturday. The BDO had found a nice format: One ladies quarterfinal
alternated with two men's matches. Deta Hedman was the player to open the afternoon and one could feel she was rather nervous. In the end
he won with a 104 finish against Claire Brookin who is not really a well known player but played a rather decent match. From that on
everything went quickly. Two men's matches followed. Jamie Hughes defeated Darius Labanauskas and had no problem with it. Switzerland's
Thomas Junghans stayed cool and got a 3:2 win over Danny Noppert. Might be Thomas chewing gum made the difference.Than Anastasia
Dobromyslova and Aileen de Graaf walked on stage, the Dutch lady won with 4:2 because she just played better.
The stage didn't stay empty
for long because in between the officials appeared to turn or change the board. Mark McGeeny and Glen Durrant - the number 1 seed - were
the next on stage and played one of the best matches of the day though the 3:0 win for Durrant doesn't reflect what happened. He not
really outplayed McGeeney. The next match was high class as well - Martin Phillips played much better then in his first match on Friday
and defeated Darryl Fitton 3:2. With Mayumi Ouchi the first Japanese walked on stage to play against World Champion Lisa Ashton. Mayumi
Ouchi is one of the top players in Japan and had already stood on this stage in the quarterfinals 2012. In the Lakeside Play-offs this
year she lost in the semi-finals. She had her problems on the stage - during the qualifiers she had played much better matches, but Lisa
Ashton was not really dominant either. In the following men's match Belgian Sven Verdonck had no chance at all against Englishman Pip
Blackwell who won 3:0.Martin Adams had some more problems against Poland's Krsysztof Ratajski but prevailed with 3:2.
When you look at
the BDO's statsistics you can see both players threw a more or less identical number of darts in the match - Ratajski 195 and Adams 199.
Quite an interesting figure. In the last ladies match Fallon Sherrock and Akari Oshiro met at the oche. Sherrock didn't play very
consistent - it was a tough match for her and she even had lost would Oshiro have hit with her Matchdarts in the sixth leg.. The two
last matches of the day were the fastest. I just managed to update my site in-between "Bald Eagles" walk-on and his 3:0 win against
Madars Razma. I've no idea whether Razma had told Butler before the match he had a train to catch.But it certainly had a bad effect
on Razma's doubles. Almost as fast was the match between the Dutch Richard Veenstra and Scott Waites - a 3:0 win for Waites.
Nice that the players took us into account - I was back at the hotel at 8 pm. Might be I will manage to be in bed before half past one in the morning this time!
