{"id":236660,"date":"2026-01-09T21:01:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T21:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/236660\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T21:01:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T21:01:09","slug":"kilkennys-culleton-wins-pdc-tour-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/236660\/","title":{"rendered":"Kilkenny&#8217;s Culleton wins PDC tour card"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kilkenny&#8217;s Niall Culleton won his first Professional Darts Corporation tour card after edging a last-leg decider at UK Qualifying School on Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>The 38-year carpenter battled through the field to take the second automatic tour card, at his eighth attempt, from a field of 128 at day two of Final Stage in Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n<p>He defeated England&#8217;s Danny Goddard, who had two match darts, winning the last two legs for a 6-5 victory.<\/p>\n<p>Culleton&#8217;s five-game run to the decider included an amazing 6-5 win over Sam Jackson in the last 64 when he came from five legs down.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s amazing,&#8221; Culleton told the PDC.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Winning the tour card is the start of it&#8230;it&#8217;s to build from here now and push on and see what I can push myself to do and see where it goes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Carlow&#8217;s Steve Lennon just missed out on an immediate return to the professional ranks when he lost in his board final to England&#8217;s Carl Sneyd, however, the 2019 World Cup of Darts finalist is well placed to regain his card as he sits top of the order of merit with two days&#8217; play left.<\/p>\n<p>Fourteen players from the Republic of Ireland reached the Final Stage of Q School with Tipperary&#8217;s Stephen Rosney also well placed in the rankings.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"pdc q school oom\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/0023b81c-614.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kilkenny&#8217;s Niall Culleton won his first Professional Darts Corporation tour card after edging a last-leg decider at UK&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-236660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236660","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=236660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}