Thursday 10 January 2013 22:28, UK
Rod Harrington explains why 10 players are in Premier League 2013
So why did we decide to increase the Premier League from eight players to 10 players this year? Well the top four in the world rankings - Phil Taylor, Adrian Lewis, James Wade and Michael van Gerwen - get an automatic spot and in my opinion Simon Whitlock and Raymond van Barneveld pick themselves. That left us, in my opinion, with four other people to fit into two wildcard places and I felt you could make a good case for all of them: - ANDY HAMILTON - He has made the quarter-finals of every TV event this year and the crowd love him. He's a larger-than-life character who has great passion and you rarely hear the fans boo him. He also made the Premier League semi-finals last year. - GARY ANDERSON - Everybody loves Gary Anderson, who won the Premier League in 2011, simply for his scoring power. He's such an exciting player when he's on form, even though he misses doubles. We need players who will put the fans on the edge of their seats and he does that. - ROBERT THORNTON - Many people would have put down Robert Thornton as an outsider, but he won the UK Open and beat Phil Taylor twice on Sky last year. Not many people can say they've done that in darts history! - WES NEWTON - He has had a couple of great years, even though he hasn't really done it on TV in big tournaments. He got to the final of the European Championship and is number six in the world, which merits a place, and we're hoping the Premier League will teach him to play on the big stage and win big tournaments. So as a director of the PDC, I sent an email to the PDC CEO Matt Porter and Sky Sports' Executive Producer Rory Hopkins to discuss it - and then I sent an email to Barry Hearn suggesting increasing the field to 10. It gives the spectators two more players to watch - and therefore an extra game each week - which is better value for them. We'll also bring the match format down a bit, probably best of 12 legs, because a shorter format is more exciting to watch. Plus if you end up with a bad game the crowd won't get bored because they're not up there for long. Sky were happy with the idea, Matt Porter was happy with the idea and we were just waiting to hear from Barry. He straight away agreed - and suggested the idea of relegation after each player has played each other once. In some years, we've seen players get towards the end of the league stage unable to make the top four and they've just gone through the motions. So this year, after nine weeks, two players will be relegated. We then need to fit the rest of the matches into five weeks - so in some weeks the fans will get six games on a night. We still need to work out the exact format, but the fans should get extra value. It works for them and it works for us and everybody agreed with it (which is unusual!) It got the final tick at Wednesday's PDC board meeting and that's the way things are going to be this year. To be honest there was nobody else really in the frame. Dave Chisnall won the Tour Players Championship, but hasn't really done anything on TV yet. There's no doubt he's an unbelievable player and in the future he will probably get in if he carries on the way he is. But at this moment in time it was only really the 10 names that were considered.
