The night started with a bang as the two biggest darts stars in the world played out a high-quality contest that went down to a final-leg decider.<\/p>\n
Humphries and Littler both hit seven 180s and averaged over 102 and 105 respectively, but both were surprisingly poor on the outer ring – missing 28 doubles between them.<\/p>\n
Humphries was the better player throughout, but at 4-1 up he started missing doubles badly, 17 in all by the end of the match, as Littler engineered an escape to make it five straight wins against his big rival.<\/p>\n
World number two Humphries has now lost 11 of his 15 Premier League meetings with Littler, with his last victory of any kind against the 19-year-old coming in the tournament’s final last May.<\/p>\n
The past four defeats before this one came in tournament finals, and perhaps it is becoming a mental barrier now for the defending Premier League champion as his scoring was solid all game, but he could just not get over the line.<\/p>\n
Comebacks were a theme of the opening quarter-finals with all bar Van Gerwen’s stroll against an out-of-sorts Josh Rock filled with excitement.<\/p>\n
Stephen Bunting finished bottom of the table last year after failing to win a single match in the first eight weeks, but looked to have one sewn up when leading 4-0, only to watch Jonny Clayton reel off six straight legs to win 6-4.<\/p>\n
And Price had to come from 3-1 and 4-2 down to beat Gian van Veen in the first of his two 6-5 victories on the night. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The night started with a bang as the two biggest darts stars in the world played out a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-295264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295264","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=295264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}