Sport Round Up

8/1/16

A busy time in the Sport section today starting with Mike Henderson who continues with his BDO World Darts Championship coverage and has bets in all four of today’s quarter-finals. In addition, Matt of Football Elite has given his take on how to approach the FA Cup ahead of this weekend’s Third Round matches and, for what it is worth, I have had a look at The Masters Snooker that starts on Sunday. The NFL has now reached the knock-out stages and Ross Miles’s preview of the Play-Off games will be uploaded on Saturday. Andy Richmond is under the weather so his Trading Talk article will be a couple of days later this week. Carl Redden will be previewing the Australian Open Tennis next week.

I am usually seriously under the pump at this time of the year writing the book so, giving that up has finally given me some time to do other things in January and February. That said, yesterday was my first day off work (of sorts) since Christmas Day which gave me time to catch up with a few things including watching a DVD of Being AP which was a fascinating insight into the man. If you have not caught it, it mainly centres round the mental agony of him coming to terms with his impending retirement and how he deals with it. And he has one hell of a clock in his dining room that I want.

In fact, I had a real slob-out day yesterday as also watched the darts and Birdman, winner of Best Film at the Oscars last year (I enjoyed it but it wasn’t that good - looking forward to seeing The Hateful Eight in the next week) but I couldn’t quite bring myself to catch any of the first day of the carnival at Meydan. I’ll start to get interested in that in February when they have their versions of the classics and trials for Dubai World Cup night. Back to reality today where I’ll be looking at Chepstow and Kempton in the main for the weekend preview.

Glen Durrant apart, the BDO darts might not be a patch on the PDC but it’s good fun all the same. Hard work at times as we saw yesterday when the ladies’ world champion missed over 40 darts at the double hitting it only four times (I’ll spare the blushes of the player who missed the board altogether) but the World Youth Final between, you’ve got to love these nicknames, Jordan ‘Bulletproof’ Boyce and Joshua ‘Stealth’ Richardson was good entertainment. And if you thought some of the walk-ons in the PDC are cringing then wait until you see The Danish Diamond, Ann Louise-Peters, ahead of her semi-final. Deta Hedman strikes me as value at 7/4 to claim the ladies’ title with Lisa Ashton having been dumped out by x9 winner Trina Gulliver, who herself could barely buy a double.