surprisingly beaten by debutant Arno Merk<\/a> on Tuesday.<\/p>\nVan Gerwen said he was “not surprised by his performance” given the Scotsman’s inconsistent recent record and added that “it’s time for him to retire anyway”.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old Dutchman beat William O’Connor to reach the third round at Alexandra Palace.<\/p>\n
Wright, who became world champion in 2020 and 2022, has not made it past the quarter-finals of any televised ranking tournament in the past two years.<\/p>\n
The 55-year-old last won a European Tour event in 2024 and a Players Championship in 2022.<\/p>\n
Wright was not selected for the 2025 Premier League Darts season and failed to qualify for the Grand Slam of Darts for the first time since 2012.<\/p>\n
The Dutchman’s comments follow Wright’s recent suggestion that Van Gerwen’s “vision is probably going”., external<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three-time world champion Michael van Gerwen says Peter Wright should retire following his emphatic defeat in the second…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-208779","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\/208779","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=208779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}