Darts will become the latest high-profile sport to head to Saudi Arabia when the World Series Tour begins next year and it’s fair to say the announcement was greeted by a mixed response from fans.
The PDC’s first ever tournament in the kingdom takes place on January 19-20 at the 1,000-capacity Global Theater in Riyadh, with the likes of Luke Littler, Luke Humphries and a host of other star names in action.
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Obviously, a lot of fans are questioning how the atmosphere will compare to what we’re used to seeing in the UK, but on the oche all the attention will be on what “crazy concept” Turki Alalshikh has vowed to introduce to the sport.
I’m going to talk about both of these issues in this week’s column.
What will the ‘crazy concept’ at the Saudi Arabia Masters be?
The Riyadh Season Snooker Championship offered a £745,000 bonus if a player potted a ‘golden ball’ worth 20 points after a maximum 147 break to complete a historic 167 clearance and although it wasn’t ever achieved, it got everyone talking.
Now darts fans and players are wondering what “crazy concept” Turki Alalshikh is going to come up with to bring to the Saudi Arabia Darts Masters in January.
I will be astonished if it’s a standard Winmau Blade 6 Triple Core on the wall. I’d be amazed.
There will be some sort of carrot there for players to unlock a big bonus, just like the golden ball in snooker. It’s just the way they do things and we should embrace that.
After all, it’s just for one World Series event and because it’s obviously not ranked, it’s an ideal opportunity to try something very different that darts fans and players have never seen before.
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One idea would be making the bullseye gold and if you hit a 170 finish to win the match you get a huge bonus. Or if you hit a three ‘golden’ bullseye 150 checkout to win the match – that kind of thing.
In this scenario it would be interesting if a player is on, for example, 181 in a deciding leg, will they simply score 11 to give themselves a shot at the bonus in the next visit or just try and win the match as simply as possible?!
I personally think the most realistic opportunity here is for a ‘perfect’ nine darter for a million pounds – 167, 167, 167.
It’s never been done before in professional competition and nobody ever really attempts it but if a bonus was on the table, you’d get a lot of players at least trying to open up a leg with a 167. If they get it then they’ll try and continue with it. If they don’t get it, they’ll just play darts normally.
Of course the problem with this kind of thing is that it could get a bit repetitive if every player tries to do something so unusual and make it feel like a complete novelty competition.
I was thinking about whether they could put another bullseye inside the bullseye but from an engineering perspective it doesn’t work. The bullseye is the tightest, most compact segment on the dartboard. So, if you were to do that again with a smaller bullseye, you wouldn’t be able to get the dart to stick in it with certain angles.
With this in mind, they could change the dartboard completely.
They don’t have to use a standard match play dartboard, as they used to say on Bullseye. When you look at the old version of Bullseye, the 20 was white, the treble 20 was still red but the bullseye was black.
The dartboard hasn’t always been the way it is now. Is there any reason why the Saudis will want to have exactly the same board as every other tournament? No.
There was an April Fool’s joke from Blue Square, the old betting company, many years ago ahead of the UK Open when they said the board was going to be square!
A few of us were fooled by it for a few minutes at least and were starting to get excited about the fact that double 12 could be vertical!
But is there any reason why the board has to be round apart from tradition!?
It’s tradition not to go to Saudi Arabia for darts, so maybe they might change the entire thing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a Quaddro style board was brought back, or something new with different sections.
The options are endless and I’m fascinated to see what they’re going to do because it can’t possibly just be a normal World Series event.
I am someone who regularly says there are too many unranked events – but if we are going to have this many, why not play around with one of them and think outside the box. And this is the perfect opportunity to do just that.
Will the atmosphere in Saudi Arabia make the event feel flat?
Amidst much controversy in recent times, there’s been a whole host of sports that have received the lucrative benefits that hosting events in Saudi Arabia can bring such as boxing, tennis, golf, Formula One, snooker and even WWE Wrestling, while the men’s football World Cup will be staged there in 2034.
A common criticism of all these events – aside from the political issues of course – is how the atmosphere seems very stale and uninspiring for the sports fans watching from home, while Saudi Arabia’s strict no-alcohol policy isn’t something you’d associate with a venue that’s prime for a darts tournament!
But just because we’re not going to see a raucous Ally Pally or Premier League style atmosphere, does that really mean we can’t enjoy the quality of darts on the stage?
First and foremost, the players aren’t bothered at all, so you can expect more great performances from them like we’ve seen in other quieter venues like Bahrain in the past couple of years.
But more importantly, when we compare atmospheres of sports venues around the world, we’ve got to accept that some places are going to be totally different. It doesn’t mean less animated fans are just sat there not enjoying it.
If they weren’t enjoying it, they wouldn’t be there.
Some fans are saying “well it’s going to be nothing like Ally Pally.” But Saudi Arabia don’t want that atmosphere.
They have a somewhat understated atmosphere, which is their way of enjoying things, and that’s fine.
Because we’re not going to get a whole bunch of people buying tickets from England, Germany or the Netherlands flying to Riyadh to watch the darts, we’re instead going to see a crowd of people based in Saudi, Bahrain and neighbouring countries. People who have different cultures and ways of expressing themselves at sports events.
We can’t only have darts being played in venues like ours.
We go to Saudi Arabia obviously for the financial injection but also to show that the sport can be played in all kinds of different atmospheres and embraced by different cultures.
Interestingly, the biggest crowd we’ve ever had, accumulatively, on a weekend for the European Tour, was Hungary recently, in Budapest.
There was about 6,000 people in the venue each night with the world’s best players on stage. But the atmosphere was quiet.
I spoke to a couple of the Hungarian people that I know, and I said “are they not enjoying it?”
And they said: “No, no. That’s how they enjoy it.”
They were sitting, watching every dart, and not all drinking beers and chanting. They are sitting there intently because culturally, Hungary is different to the UK and Germany and Czechia. They go there because they want to watch it.
It will be a different atmosphere, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
