Tuesday 18 September 2012

Antwerp Open

This past weekend I was in the country of Belgium playing the Antwerp open which is the second to last tournament for me to gain some World ranking points for Lakeside World Championships and last chance to get points for the Zuiderduin Masters which is classed as another major in the BDO/WDF calendar which takes place in Holland in early December.

I followed my usual travelling routine of flying to Amsterdam and staying with good friends in Veldhoven for the weekend.

I played in the Mixed pairs with Stephen Bunting on the Saturday morning and I am happy to say that we came out the eventual winners on the day. We got to the final without to much hassle and never dropped a leg till we made the final. In the final we were pushed a little harder and was happy to come out 4-3 winners over Darrel Fitton and his partner.

Next in the day was the Ladies pairs. I was without my usual partner in crime Lorraine Farlam as she was in England participating in the LDO "Ladies Darts Classic". I would have liked to have been able to attend this event but I had already booked flights to Holland before this tournament was finalised earlier in the year. I will speak more about this later.

In the pairs I teamed up with a friend, Monique and we were unfortunate to loose in our second game 3-2 against the very experienced pairing of Dutch internationals, Prins & Schuur. Was nice to play in this game and one leg I was able to hit 2x180.

Sunday was the real reason I had come over to play as it was the Ladies singles. It was a seeded draw and as it turned out because of other seeded players entering and not being able to turn up, the bottom half of the draw which I was in had 4 of the 5 seeds that attended.

I had some comfortable games during the day and some tight games which were of my own doing due to lack of concentration at times. I had played well in the semi-final against Unicorn and Russian team mate Irina Armstrong and was 4-0 up when I let the concentration slip. I had just enough left at the end to come through a 5-4 winner and progress to the Final where I was playing Rachna David from Norway. I won the final which was best of 3 sets, 2 sets to nil, Again I was good in patches and bad in others. This was again due to concentration and I also feel the long wait for the stage finals did not help me, But I cant complain with the win and the 22 points I gained.

I have almost certainly guaranteed myself a second seed at Lakeside in January with the recent victory as my nearest rival Julie Gore is a fair few points behind now on the rolling table.http://www.bdodarts.com/tables.aspx?tid=8 (This table has WDF World cup points to come off)

In the Zuiderduin ranking table I have finished third as I have heard I'm not guaranteed to be in this tournament due to the way they give out places in the rankings and wild cards. I'm hoping that I have a place in this but I will just have to wait and see what the organisation decide to do with the invites.http://www.dartswdf.com/Zuiderduin/Zuiderduin-2012-RW.html

As I was reporting earlier my normal partner Lorraine Farlam was attending a tournament in England run by the newly formed Ladies Darts Organisation. This is a organisation that is pushing the ladies game forward independently after it being held back for long periods of time by others in the game. It was unfortunate that I was not able to attend this event but I will be giving it my full support in the future and would urge all Lady players from all over the world to get on board and join as members. I have included the link for the website for you all to have a look at. http://www.ladiesdartsorganisation.com

My next travels take me down to the Sussex cost to play in the EDO England Classic taking place in Selsey. I believe their may be some live internet streaming so I hope you will be able to catch me live over the coming weekend if I'm lucky enough to make the stage finals. http://www.englanddarts.co.uk

Don't forget that you can book me or any of the other GR8 of darts players by enquiring at http://www.gr8ofdarts.co.uk

Well I have typed enough and now its time to get back to the practice.

Thanks for reading and hope to see you all soon.

Anastasia xx

1 comment:

  1. Well done, winning has certainly become a habit.

    Now all you need to do is get rid of spud.

    ReplyDelete