Chelmsford 4 - 6 Coach & Horses

A neat practice shot. They landed in the board from left to right.

C&H played a much better game than last week, yet we were still able to score 4 points to take the total to a reasonable 25 from 4 games. After going 0-3 down with C&H showing impressive form it was a relief to get something out of the game, and C&H only secured the win in the final leg of the night.

Performance of the night has to go to C&H's Billy who hit the winning finished in his Team, Doubles, and Singles games. Every time he was looking at a double he hit it.

C&H's Ian scored a 180 and immediately followed it with a 123 which was millimetres away from being a consecutive maximum.

Alan P from our team finished from 66 in impressive manner; after bouncing out on the T10 with his first dart he then succeeded with the 2 dart out shot of S16, Bull.

I was fairly happy with my own game overall, but like the rest of our team I was a bit of a slow starter.

Coach & Horses 6 - 4 Chelmsford

Unicorn Hero 95% T/A, 27g

We got off to a bad start last night, trailing by 300 points in the opening 1001X Team Game and allowing C&H the luxury of a leisurely point.

From this point though C&H seemed to ease off and a couple of them didn't play to their usual standards. This allowed us into the game and we managed to pick up 4 points and even feel we could have had more.

Kris and Alan P both hit a string of high scoring shots in their Singles games, and I was pleased with my own game. I think practising less is making me feel a bit more relaxed on match nights, and I'll post about this soon.

Chelmsford 8 - 2 Castleside

Good vertical accuracy on a practice board 180

Castleside made some minor changes to their team from last week, and most of the games were close despite the score. I found from my chats with them last week that many of them don't play that often. This always rings the alarm bells for me and I went to great lengths to stay focused and take nothing for granted. The points they won in the Singles game against our rising player Kris and the Doubles game with our senior player Peter demonstrates this point.

The performance of the evening went to one of their players from Wigan who is currently contract working up here. He hit the highest finish of the night by taking out a 91 finish against Kris in a Singles game with an unconventional but effective T20 / S11 / D10.

Castleside also had an older player who hit the bull on most of his shots in the Singles game. This was helping him to score build very well, and I think the surprising number of bulls was rattling his opponent, Mark H. The game was tight to the end, with Mark very relieved to hit the winning double.

I was pleased to get a good string of steady 60's as well as some high scoring shots. Steady 60's are the holy grail for me. I'm sick of having to try to rescue 45's and 26's with 80+ shots.

Tommys Darts news

I've just received an e-mailed newsletter from Pure Darts, the on-line presence for Tommy's Darts. There are a few new products worth a mention:

They now print personalised text on flights using the hot foil process. They have been doing something similar for quite a while, but this time you can choose the type of flight the message is printed on, and importantly you can opt for the strong R4X flights. I've had flights printed in the past, but until now they used the ordinary flights which are not as durable as the R4Xs.

New to their products are football flights, football stems, UK County emblem flights, and some new international flights.

The Deflectagrip Nylon Stems I use are now at a rock bottom price of just 13p per set, and they're doing a range of 95% Tungsten alloy darts at just £12.99 per set. There's not much choice in the 27g weight I prefer, but the other weights seem well represented. Take a look at their site - the range is huge.

Castleside 1 - 9 Chelmsford

Practice darts

Our opening game of the season went well with a victory against some new faces in the Castleside team. Castleside were capable of getting more points from this game, but we finished well in most of the games to minimise their chances.

We fielded our new player Chris, and he did well in his first League game. He's only just bought his own set of darts and started practicing but he fitted in well and won a Singles point.

My practice on the lower doubles during the week paid off as I finished a D19 quite well, but I struggled to get a good first dart into the 20 on a few occasions, often trying to rescue shots by covering on 19's.

Elsewhere on the night The Wheatsheaf beat The Turf 9-1 away.

Our 2008/9 season starts tomorrow night

The Unicorn Hero 95% 27grms

I've just being doing some very light practice in the last two weeks. Typically I'll play a game of Bob's 27, three games of 301 DS/DF, and three games of 501 straight in.

DartPro is really very useful in recording my progress in these three formats, and when playing the 301 & 501 games I class it as a defeat if my average for the leg is less than the prevailing 3-year average which I've built up over the years on DartPro. This adds a bit of pressure on the finishing shots, as slack finishing ruins the three dart average for the leg.

One slight difference to my grip has come about while trying to improve accuracy on the low doubles such as D3. I noticed I got better results by holding the dart nearer the tip, and in tightening up on the low doubles this grip seems to do well on the mid and high targets too.