Buffering, freezes and blurred vision – welcome to darts’ answer to lockdown
PDC has best of intentions with its Home Tour, but, says Rob Bagchi, it needs to sort out the technology
How we laughed when we heard that Gary Anderson had pulled out of the 32-night Professional Darts Corporation Home Tour because his broadband signal was neither strong nor reliable enough to guarantee a staccato-free stream.
It took less than 15 minutes of the opening match between world champion Peter Wright and Peter Jacques to salute his wisdom and prescience: the PDC website crashed, Twitter raged and even the broadcast on the Sky Sports app was blemished by frequent glitsches and had regularly to resort to the channel’s ident, our century’s potter’s wheel.
Wright’s wife again applied her unusual take on the coiffeur’s art by giving Peter a timely rainbow Mohawk with blue NHS heart motif plastered on the side of his head.
The disparity in rankings – Wright is 118 places higher than Jacques and has earned £941,000 more in prize money over the past two years – provided sharp contrasts to indulge in the new national sport of critiquing everyone else’s interior design.
The world champion’s impressive home rig in Norfolk had an illuminated halo in front of his board with pine panelling behind, clearly more executive shed or man cave than draughty garage. Jacques, in Denby Dale in West Yorkshire, was in the master bedroom, having banished his wife downstairs.
His was a more familiar set-up of sponge doughnut around the board to save the plasterwork. Wright can afford to be more carefree with the fixtures and fittings. Players do not win world titles if they leave the cladding looking as if it’s been violated by a woodpecker.
The second pair in the round robin, Wales’s Jamie Lewis and Niels Zonneveld, from Holland, were in a spare bedroom and attic respectively but Lewis, the winner on the night, disconcertingly, was bathed in a primrose glow, giving the impression that he was playing in front of an oven or by candlelight.
The format was straightforward – all four play each other over nine legs and whoever tops the table at the end of the night proceeds to the next round. In the absence of the resounding Russ Bray to foghorn the scores, the players were entrusted to call their totals themselves. We had to take their word for it because the pixellation, stopmotion and blotchy lighting took us back to the days at Jollees and a room full of 40-a-day gaspers and nicotine pea-soupers. As far as authentic darts atmosphere was concerned, that unwelcome throwback was about as close as it got.
Stripped back to basics without the walk-ons and beery bonhomie, it should have given us an opportunity to see how players fared without the tension of a crowd and no heckling, not even from a spouse in her sittingroom exile. The players were essentially taking on the board rather than an opponent, and their averages from the action we were able to see were appropriately high. Snooker players count the 147s they make in practice and in darts they note the higher occurrence of nine-darters when professionals play solo tuning up for tournament play. On the evidence here, those holy grail achievements are not necessarily the product of Billy Liar fantasies.
The PDC deserves credit for the homespun concept and its good intention to provide socially distant sport. But the execution on opening night was terrible, ruined by buffering, freezes and blurred vision. So little control over the technology did the producers have that midway through the concluding leg of the final match they even broadcast what was meant to be an off-air instruction to presenter Dan Dawson about addressing – or rather not – the night’s myriad problems before he signed off.
For entirely selfless and, as it turned out, perceptive reasons Anderson did the right thing in not taking part. The PDC needs to fix this or the entire audience will follow his lead.
After less than 15 minutes the website crashed, Twitter raged and Sky Sports app had glitsches