The first round of the Cazoo European Championship will be finished off on Friday when the top half of the draw take to the stage in Salzburg for the first time this week as we get set to determine the last 16 places for Saturday.
We saw a major upset on the opening night when the defending champion Peter Wright bit the dust and that is likely to focus the minds of the big names who get their campaign underway over the course of Friday evening.
First Four Matches
One of the brighter young talents on the European scene has the chance to get the action underway on Friday evening when the Czech ace Adam Gawlas goes up against Joe Murnan, who has taken advantage of the shorter schedule on the European Tour to make it through to this event. Two men who are in decent form follow them when the Polish star Krzysztof Ratajski takes on the World Grand Prix semi-finalist Danny Noppert before James Wade begins his quest for the title against the lowest ranked player in the field in Adam Smith-Neale. We head to the halfway mark of the evening with Nathan Aspinall taking on Mervyn King.
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Later Four Matches
The second half of the evening begins with what should be a very entertaining contest as Michael Smith takes on a Ryan Searle who looked in good touch in the World Grand Prix. When they are done Michael van Gerwen gets his campaign underway looking for a much better showing than he produced in Leicester last week. He meets the Croatian player Boris Krcmar before the world champion Gerwyn Price takes to the stage. He faces the last man into the field in the form of Ritchie Edhouse. The last match of the session, and indeed the first round, sees Damon Heta meeting Gabriel Clemens.
Betting
The match which catches my eye from a betting point of view is the one between Michael Smith and Ryan Searle in the second half of the evening. These two are pretty much similar versions of the same player with their strengths and weaknesses very much the same. I just feel that Smith does what they do well a little bit better and at this level he probably isn’t quite as indifferent in what they don’t do well as Searle is.
Both men score very well while hitting doubles is a little bit of a weakness of both however when you go through the best of Smith’s results recently an awful lot of them appear in Europe which might be significant here. Searle is very much on the up but there is still one or two too many poor visits in him and doubles can be a real issue and over a sprint to six that is a real concern. I’ll take Smith, who has a point to prove this weekend, to come out on top in this one.
Tips
Back M.Smith to beat R.Searle for a 3/10 stake at 1.80 with Betfair
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