Five-time world champion Raymond van Barneveld was left stunned after falling to a straight sets defeat by Switzerland’s Stefan Bellmont in their first-round clash at Alexandra Palace.<\/p>\n
Bellmont produced the performance of his career to become the first Swiss player win a match at the World Darts Championship.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old from Cham hopes that his success will inspire a wave of darts enthusiasts in his home country.<\/p>\n
“I have no words for this. I\u2019m proud of myself. This is a great experience for all Swiss people. Hopefully we will get more Swiss people playing darts,” he said.<\/p>\n
James Wade, the world number seven who is a four-time semi-finalist at Alexandra Palace, brushed aside Japan\u2019s Ryusei Azemoto in straight sets.<\/p>\n
Wade dropped just one leg and now faces Ricky Evans in round two.<\/p>\n
“That was more luck than judgement \u2013 thankfully he got more nervous than I did,” Wade said. “I made the most of my opportunities. Textbook.<\/p>\n
“I haven\u2019t won a game for three years, so I had put a lot of pressure on myself. I\u2019m just happy to win and move forward.”<\/p>\n
The night\u2019s action began with American Adam Sevada overcoming Canada\u2019s Matt Campbell 3-1 and ended with German 13th seed Martin Schindler beating England\u2019s Stephen Burton by the same score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five-time world champion Raymond van Barneveld was left stunned after falling to a straight sets defeat by Switzerland’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-197499","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\/197499","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=197499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}