Darts without Spin - Stop pretending, BDO darts

January 12 2009

Stop pretending, BDO darts

We may still be less than a fortnight into 2009, but darts has its World Champion for the year – Ted Hankey, who won the BDO-organised event. Unless, of course, you mean Phil Taylor, who is also 2009 World Dart Champion with the PDC.

The split in darts has been well-enough publicised already (and there is a good summary of it here on Wikipedia), but to have two men call themselves World Champion is pushing the boundaries of logic. There used to be a time when the competition was fairly even between the two organising boards – but this year, as the Wikipedia chart shows, the PDC players were averaging 93.8 every time they threw, while the BDO players were averaging 87.6.

To put that in some kind of context, the final of the BDO saw Hankey average 91.5, while his opponent Tony O'Shea averaged 90.6. As Phil Taylor dismantled Ray Barneveld 7-1 in the PDC event, he did so with an average of 110.94, while Barney himself threw 101.18. In that form, Hankey would have struggled to win a set against the runner-up at the PDC event. If we at Sport without Spin arrange a game of 501, we can't really call the winner the World Champion, and neither should the BDO.

So if we accept, as most unflinchingly would, that the standard is better in the PDC, then why does the Lakeside offer a more appealing competition? Maybe it's the quality of the fans, then. Robert Holmes, BDO spokesman, obviously thinks so – he is reported as saying the following to Ben Dirs of the BBC:

"At the PDC, everyone's waving those boards about and just trying to get on TV," adds BDO spokesman Robert Holmes. "It's just one big booze-up and the darts is secondary."

Later in the same article, Dirs asks a fan watching the BDO event about darts' popularity in the UK and Holland and it transpires that pots can indeed call kettles black:

I ask Charona from Amsterdam why she thinks the UK and Holland are at the vanguard of darts. "Beer," she fires back, before jumping to her feet and waving a '180' board above her head. Thousands follow suit.

The Lakeside is a great venue, and the darts are always enjoyable. Just don't call yourselves the World Professional Championships any more, because it is evidently not the measure of who is the best player in the world. It's also evidently not a higher quality venue with a better class of fan either. If the BDO and the PDC can't reform into one tournament, the least the BDO can do is appreciate the reality of their position in the sport.