Premier League 13 - Seventh League Day, Cardiff
Cardiff hosts this week's Premier League, we discuss the bruising encounters of week 6!
It was another week of bruising encounters in The PDC Premier League. There were some tremendous battles, hostility and for some, an unexpected thumping! We are actually referring to the crowd of course although the darts followed a similar pattern too! It was the crowd though at the MEN arena who stole most of the headlines after the usual raucous behaviour of the "fans" took a nasty twist. Fights broke out, drinks (at least we all hope they were drinks) were thrown from the balconies and carnage of Premier League proportion ensued! It was quite a sad sightThe Power, in an unusually unprofessional manner seemed to be most affected by the rumpus, certainly much more so than his opponent Andy Hamilton. Taylor seemed distracted by the scenes; he was caught gazing out on the chaos several times. Much like some crowd members referred to earlier, he also got a quite unexpected thumping (metaphorically speaking of course) from The Hammer- 7 legs to 3. This result has even pushed Taylor out of the four playoff spots.
This is just the latest twist in the race for the coveted four playoff places. Another was that no sooner had we heralded James Wade as our man of the tournament so far, he did what MVG and The Thorn did the previous week. He moved from looking unbeatable to average in the space of seven days! We did tell you last week it's a funny old game!
Week Seven
Our forecasts last week went one out of two again, although the Hamilton/Taylor checkout of 120 or higher was a case of what may have been if only The Power had been fully focused on the job in hand. Newton outscored MVG in the checkouts though to bring home our 6/4 shout that this would be the outcome!Our first tip this week is going to involve The Hammer again and checkouts again. This week Hamilton is up against The Wizard. Out of the first six weeks of matches there has only been one week when neither of them has hit a 120 or higher checkout! This is why the over 116.5 on offer at 5/6 with Ladbrokes has some appeal. 5/6 is on offer across the board but the next best is 119 or over and then 121 or over. We have some built in insurance going with the magic sign!
For our second tip we are going to look at The Thorn, fresh from a Pro Tour win on Sunday (and a good draw against Barney last week) and Jackpot, who is slowly but surely returning to some sort of form. The bet is for them to hit 7 or more 180's between them. They have both averaged three a game so far so, although The Thorn was averaging 4.5 per game for the first 4 weeks. There is some risk but if Thornton can find his form from the first month then Jackpot is capable of chipping in to reach our target. At 10/11 it is a risk worth attempting.