Gian van Veen has a point to prove today. He’s the world No.7 but has yet to win a single World Championship match.<\/p>\n
The Dutchman, though, believes he can kickstart something special if he beats Cristo Reyes later today.<\/p>\n
“I have grown so much this year as a player. The first year was heartbreak, losing to Man Lok Leung. Last year I didn’t perform at all against Ricardo Pietreczko, so I still haven’t won a game there yet,” Van Veen said.<\/p>\n
“But as I said, I have grown so much, I am much more confident this year. I’m really looking forward to getting back to Ally Pally to hopefully put that right, what I didn’t do the last two years.<\/p>\n
“Hopefully have a great run there as well. As soon as I get my first win, the pressure is off my shoulders, and then hopefully I can get many more wins.<\/p>\n
“People are probably going to expect me to get to the last 16 or quarter-finals, but for me it’s just winning my first game, and then make it to Christmas, then hopefully make it into New Year.<\/p>\n
“It is a big tournament, lots of weeks of darts, so I am just setting mini-goals for myself and hopefully I can achieve them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gian van Veen has a point to prove today. He’s the world No.7 but has yet to win…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[124314,124315,59,17322,124313,101,56,54,55,124312],"class_list":["post-312636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-alexandra-palace","tag-ally-pally","tag-gb","tag-luke-littler","tag-michael-smith","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-world-darts-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}