Rob Cross put a horrible couple of months behind him as he won his opening match at the World Championship.<\/p>\n
The 2018 debutant champion has been on a poor run of form, having lost his last five matches going back to 15 October.<\/p>\n
But Cross has happy memories of the Alexandra Palace stage and did not need to be at his best to get past Cor Dekker 3-0.<\/p>\n
That will boost his confidence going into the second round after dropping only two legs and sealing victory with a 170 checkout.<\/p>\n
Ian White won the battle of the veterans as he beat Mervyn King 3-2.<\/p>\n
Both men are over 50 and it was ‘Diamond’ who came out shining in a contest that went all the way.<\/p>\n
The opening match did little to support the PDC’s decision to expand the tournament to 128 players as Niels Zonneveld and Haupai Puha were involved in an hour-long slug fest.<\/p>\n
The Ally Pally crowd did not need much invitation to be distracted as Zonneveld won a low quality affair 3-0.<\/p>\n
Ryan Searle made light work out of Chris Landman, winning 3-0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rob Cross put a horrible couple of months behind him as he won his opening match at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-189170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}