The former world champion and world No 1 Michael Smith led the high-profile casualties on a day of shocks at the PDC world championship.<\/p>\n
Smith lost 3-1 to the Dutchman Niels Zonneveld to join his fellow seeds Chris Dobey, Dave Chisnall and Dirk van Duijvenbode on the Alexandra Palace scrapheap. The 2023 champion missed a dart at double top for the third set, with Zonneveld clinching it with double 10 to move ahead.<\/p>\n
Smith then went for a showbiz 170 finish with Zonneveld a long way back, but after he missed, the 27-year-old from Uitgeest hit 180 and a 77 checkout to break for 2-0 in the fourth before completing the job in the next leg.<\/p>\n
Zonneveld, who will meet fifth seed Johnny Clayton in round three, told Sky Sports: \u201cIt means the world. I dreamed about this as a boy and now it came true. I\u2019ve survived until Christmas and it\u2019s such a good feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dobey, the eighth seed, was beaten by an inspired performance from the 55-year-old Andrew Gilding, who averaged 99.01 and hit a 10-dart leg in a 3-1 victory. \u201cHow do I feel? Amazing,\u201d said Gilding. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened. I felt really bad in practice, but that\u2019s usually a good sign.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chisnall was dumped out by the German Ricardo Pietreczko despite hitting 11 maximums. The No 21 seed paid the price for double trouble and missed a match dart in the final set when it seemed as though he would complete a remarkable recovery.<\/p>\n
Andrew Gilding meets the media after beating Chris Dobey. Photograph: Katie Chan\/Action Plus\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
James Hurrell claimed one of the biggest wins of his career by upsetting Van Duijvenbode, the 29th seed, 3-2. Hurrell missed two match darts for a final-set whitewash, but he held his nerve to win the next leg and will next meet the fourth seed, Stephen Bunting, who avoided the carnage with a routine 3-0 win over India\u2019s Nitin Kumar.<\/p>\n
The crowd favourite Motomu Sakai bowed out, with his conqueror, Andreas Harrysson, admitting he had been worried by the Japanese\u2019s exuberant walk-on. Sakai has become a cult hero this week, with fans warming to his energetic dance moves and his signing autographs en route to the stage.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old qualifier won his opening match against Thibault Tricole 3-0, but went down by the same scoreline to Sweden\u2019s Harrysson as the second-round action got under way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a bit worried seeing his walk-on,\u201d Harrysson said after following up his first-round win over the 12th seed, Ross Smith. \u201cBut I think I managed it quite OK. I think he wasn\u2019t as he was in the first game on the stage. It\u2019s a great feeling. I didn\u2019t play my best, but nor did he. It was a great win.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ryan Searle averaged over 98 in an impressive straight-sets win over Brendan Dolan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former world champion and world No 1 Michael Smith led the high-profile casualties on a day of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-202718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202718","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=202718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}