Premier League of Darts 2019
Weekly from Thursday, February 7th
Sky Sports
The new Premier League of Darts season will swing into action on February 7th and there is little surprise about who is the frontrunner for the title. That will be the reigning champion Michael van Gerwen who is the 1/2 odds on market leader with the top bookmakers to get the job done. Considering that he has won the last three editions of the tournament then it’s likely that he is going to have plenty of backing behind him again.
Adding weight to the favouritism of MVG for 2019 has been the withdrawal from this season’s competition by the man regarded as his biggest challenger, Gary Anderson.
Van Gerwen has won four of the last six editions of the Premier League of Darts and has been to each of those six finals. So, of course, he has form. He has a proven track record and he is the second-most successful player in the history of the tournament. Only the retired Phil Taylor has won it more times (6) than Van Gerwen has. But Taylor’s record is likely to tumble sooner rather than later you would feel.
With wins at the World Championship and the Masters already this year for MVG, can The Field step up and beat him?
Who’s in?
Along with Van Gerwen, there are some familiar faces lining up in the Premier League of Darts 2019. Joining the reigning champion will be Rob Cross, Peter Wright, Raymond van Barneveld, Michael Smith, Gerwyn Price, Mensur Suljovic, James Wade and Daryl Gurney. Each of those have experienced the Premier League before.
The season will be spread across nine weeks of action in the first phase, coming from a different location each week. At the end of the those nine weeks, only the top eight move to the next phase. Those remaining eight all play another seven matches and the top four in the table at the end of all that moves through to the Final night. That big night consists of two semi-finals and the Final itself.
Big (strange) change
The 2019 Premier League of Darts, which again will have its end of season Finals night at The O2 Arena in London, has had a bizarre shake-up. Two-time Premier League of Darts winner Gary Anderson has withdrawn ahead of the tournament because of injury. It’s unusual to have a player pull out of a darts tournament, but that’s not the strange thing. What is bizarre is that organisers (the PDC) have replaced the Scotsman with nine different players.
Yes, nine. A different player, which includes BDO World Champion Glen Durrant, will be making an appearance in each of the nine weeks over the first phase of the regular season. That, of course, raises massive questions about an uneven playing field. A regular Premier League of Darts player going up against Durrant, for example, may find themselves having a tougher match than someone who goes up against one of the others.
For example on the opening week in Newcastle, invite Chris Dobey will be taking on Mensur Suljovic. Then on week two in Glasgow, it will be Glen Durrant going up against Daryl Gurney. Who gets the easier game, Suljovic or Gurney? So it’s strange but there is a caveat. There will be no points earned by any of the invited replacement players in terms of the league standings if they win or draw. However, the Premier League of Darts player will collect points for a win (or draw) from their game against an invited player.
Who can upset MVG?
The Premier League of Darts is a fascinating and strange beast. Players don’t have the chance to build up big momentum like they would in a week-long tournament. The competition rewards long-term consistency over four months of action. Gary Anderson is the only other active player besides Van Gerwen who has won the Premier League on more than one occasion. So players with form become thin on the ground when you start looking for a challenger to MVG. James Wade and Raymond van Barneveld are the only others to have won the title, Wade in 2009 and Barney in 2014.
But last season we saw two of the big new names in the sport put together some pretty strong campaigns. 2018 World Champion Rob Cross reached the semi-finals on his Premier League debut, while English compatriot Michael Smith went one better and faced up against Van Gerwen in the final itself. The outcome didn’t go the way of Smith but that was an impressive campaign on just his second appearance in the Premier League. Smith finished rock bottom in 2016 on his debut. Smith and Cross are 8/1 and 10/1 outright winner options for the 2019 edition of the Premier League of Darts.
Victory in Variety
ut here is the beauty of the Premier League of Darts when it comes to betting. It’s not particularly about the bigger picture. It’s about one big night of darts each week. It’s about eying up different options like “To Reach Semi-Final” or “To Finish Bottom”.
Like the tournament itself, you don’t have to be all one-dimensional about it.
It’s about who hasn’t been travelling well, or who has turned up with a couple of big performances in recent weeks? The time between the weekly matches allows plenty of time for the studying of statistics in things like head to head, which I personally think is a huge boon.
Each week it is like a mini-tournament just being played and that leads to some great darts betting opportunities. The tournament format really allows you to look a long way beyond just the outright winner.
MVG playing ‘The Field’
So heading into the Premier League of Darts 2019, there’s a price of 7/5 with the top bookmakers on one of the eight contenders in the “The Field” to beat Van Gerwen to the title. That is because Van Gerwen is just a beast at the Oche and because his biggest threat of Anderson isn’t there this year.
But that in itself adds a great dimension to the whole action too. There is that kick of trying to predict if and when MVG might lose. He did lose four matches through the two league phases last year, and that was a pretty average return in terms of the number of defeats across the top five finishers. So he was rattled, (particularly in phase 2) last season.
Still, he came out on top in the end, but in sport, some of the greatest moments in history have been when an underdog prevails. In this case “The Field” is the underdog. Can they stop Mighty Mike?
