We reach the halfway point of the Premier League Darts season on Thursday night when the roadshow heads to Dublin for night eight of the competition with points and another £10,000 on the line for the eight players on show.
This is the week of the campaign where the fixtures are in line with the league table with top playing bottom, second playing second bottom and so on so there is the chance for the leaders to pull away but also for the middle ranked players to make up ground if they can have a good evening.
Luke Humphries vs Peter Wright
We begin with the top against bottom clash as the world champion Luke Humphries goes up against a Peter Wright who finally got off the mark for the season last week, but now faces a tough test to double his meagre point tally.
Humphries is beginning to look pretty unstoppable at the minute. He has won the last two nights of this competition with five averages of over 100 in his six matches and it looks like he will take a lot of beating from here on in. Wright is definitely getting better the longer 2024 goes on but these two played in the semi-final last week and Humphries won 6-1. I expect a Humphries win here but that is very much highlighted in the bookmaker odds. Where there is a way in for this match is in the Wright average. Humphries is playing that well at the minute that his opponent doesn’t have time for messing around at the end of legs and so the average of his opponent often gets inflated as a result of fewer darts at a double and less visits to the board. In this two night winning burst, Humphries opponents have averaged 97.42, 98.00, 100.84, 90.31, 98.87 and 88.84, the latter where Nathan Aspinall had got over the psychological hurdle of beating Luke Littler in the semi-final a few minutes earlier. The 98.87 was Wright’s average in that semi-final last week and you can get 4/5 that he averages over 94.5 in this match. I expect that to happen regardless of the result.
Nathan Aspinall vs Rob Cross
The second quarter final of the night sees the two men either side of the top four line going at it when Nathan Aspinall will look to preserve fourth place when he takes on Rob Cross, who will be out to overtake his opponent and kick on over the rest of the night.
Aspinall has been very all or nothing this season. He has lost in four of the seven quarter finals but when he has won the quarter final he has made the final, including last week where he took care of Cross in the first game. Cross in contrast has won five of his seven quarter finals but has only progressed to the final once so while he is picking up points most weeks he isn’t then going deep enough to make the most of an evening and he will probably need to do that if he is going to reach the playoffs. This will be the fourth time these two have met in the Premier League this season and Aspinall has won their first three so I’m a little surprised to see him at odds against here. I’m not suddenly going to make out his missed doubles aren’t a concern to me but the fact that in those three matches Aspinall has had 22 darts at a double compared to 10, 20-15 and 12-7 it is clear that he is outscoring Cross to some tune at the minute and that is enough for me to trust him to get the job done here.
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Michael van Gerwen vs Gerwyn Price
We move into the second half of the quarter finals with a clash between the players sat at two and seven in the standings when Michael van Gerwen goes up against Gerwyn Price in what is one of the heavyweight clashes of modern darts.
Van Gerwen came out of the traps on fire in this tournament but he has lost his way in recent weeks as injuries have surfaced. Price never convinces me in this event and since he made the final in the opening week of the campaign he has won one of his seven matches and has now lost the last five in it. There were signs on the floor earlier in the week that MVG is slowly getting over the issue which has dogged him in recent times so if that is the case I would expect him to win, like he did when these two met in the quarter final in Newcastle last month, but despite his poor results, in this five-match losing burst only once has Price averaged less than 97.42 so he isn’t playing badly. The doubts over MVG is enough to stop me backing him but I’d like a little more juice in the Price odds to take him so I’ll leave this one alone.
Luke Littler vs Michael Smith
The last of the quarter finals in Dublin sees the players in third and sixth battling it out when Luke Littler looks to enhance his top four credentials and Michael Smith goes in search of a win which could well leave him in the playoff zone come the end of the night.
I was interested in the fact that Smith went to play the Players Championship events earlier in the week. That suggests to me that he is searching for some form and confidence before this isn’t a night that he can just drive to in a few minutes so he might have made his task a little harder. Littler swerved those events and having won the European Tour event the weekend before last he is clearly in good touch, however he won’t need me to tell him that Smith has won two of their three Premier League meetings this term. It feels like a matchup that Smith enjoys because he gets a good rhythm and his scoring can come to the fore. In those three meetings, Smith has averaged 98.04, 101.64 and 94.54 and Littler is another who can see his opponents have an inflated average because he doesn’t mess around in legs either. You can get Smith’s 3 dart average on a 94.5 line and while I’ve been keen to go under on that for much of the season, Littler will ensure not many legs go beyond 15 darts here which can see averages inflated. I like the over there.
Night 8 Betting
I guess whenever we get these nights where the fixtures are played out by the league table the player who is top of the pile is going to have something of a plot draw to win the night and that certainly looks to be the case for Luke Humphries in terms of the fact that the four players ranked two, three, six and seven are Michael van Gerwen, Luke Littler, Michael Smith and Gerwyn Price, arguably the next four best players behind Humphries in darts currently.
In contrast to that, Humphries has a quarter final against a man he thrashed 6-1 in ruthless fashion last week and 6-4 in their meeting prior to that, and then he would face either Nathan Aspinall or Rob Cross, the former of whom he beat in the final and the latter he beat in the semi-final two weeks ago. He would then have the maximum recovery time between matches to launch a decent assault on the final should he get there. The odds are fairly skinny but I’m still not sure they are reflective of the chance Humphries has of winning the night so even at 5/2 I think he’s worth a punt here.
Tips
Back P.Wright – Over 94.5 3 dart average vs L.Humphries for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Betway
Back N.Aspinall to beat R.Cross for a 3/10 stake at 2.25 with Boylesports
Back him here:
Back M.Smith – Over 94.5 3 dart average vs L.Littler for a 3/10 stake at 1.73 with Bet365
Back L.Humphries to win Night 8 for a 2/10 stake at 3.50 with Sky Bet
