All Wright on the night for Scots’ remaining hope
SCOTLAND’S last man standing in the PDC World Championship displayed nerves of steel as he battled his way through to the quarter-finals at Alexandra Palace.
Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright won a tumultuous clash with Jeffrey de Zwaan 4-3 in front of a raucous crowd in north London.
The seventh seed led 2-0 and 3-1 but the Dutchman came roaring back to level and take the match to a deciding set, which ebbed and flowed until Wright managed to close out victory in the eighth leg.
He broke the throw of the world No23 to prevail 5-3 and avoid the need for a sudden-death decider, which would have come into play if the score had reached five legs apiece in the seventh set.
It was a mighty close call for 49-year-old Wright, who looked like he might go the way of fellow Scots Gary Anderson and John Henderson, who tumbled out of the tournament on Friday.
But he showed all his battling qualities to win and set up a last-eight clash with Luke Humphries, who saw off Belgium’s Kim Huybrechts 4-1 earlier in the day. Adrian Lewis, meanwhile, crashed out after surrendering a 3-1 lead against Belgian star Dimitri van den Bergh.
Two-time champion Lewis appeared to be cruising towards the quarter-finals only for Van den Bergh to reel off three straight sets to land a famous 4-3 win and set up a last-eight showdown with Nathan Aspinall — conqueror of Scotland’s double world champion Anderson.
Van den Bergh, the 25-year-old former world youth champion, said: ‘I am amazed. I have no idea how I just beat a back-to-back champion of the world — but I did. I’m one of the eight best in the world now. Who knows how far I can go.’
Steve Beaton’s hopes of reaching the quarter-finals for the first time in his long career were ended by Lithuanian Darius Labanauskas. The Bronzed Adonis, who had not gone as far as the last 16 since 2005, was unable to recapture the kind of form that helped him shock James Wade in the previous round, especially over the final two sets of a 4-2 defeat in which he won just one leg.
Labanauskas will now meet reigning champion and world No1 Michael van Gerwen.
Tournament second favourite Gerwyn Price eased past Australia’s Simon Whitlock 4-2 last night and the Welshman now takes on last year’s BDO world champion Glen Durrant in the quarter-finals.
The man from Middlesbrough edged out Geordie Chris Dobey 4-3 in a topsy-turvy encounter.