Of the many peculiar stories that darts throws up, few match that revealed by world number 2 dart player Raymond Van Barneveld live on Sky Sports last Thursday night. Just minutes after hitting his second televised nine-dart leg in five months, the Dutchman informed a packed Premier League crowd at the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre that he has recently been the victim of an attempted blackmail plot.
“The last six weeks… problems, problems, problems every week … They tried to extort me on the phone…. they want to blackmail me.”
Quite who ‘they’ are, and what the extortion focussed on remains a mystery, but thankfully Barney reassured his fans that the police have now caught the villains, and he hopes to be able to fully focus on his game. Those fans will hope that the 9-darter signals an end to his torment, and the beginning of a new chapter in his career.
The signs, however, are not encouraging.
Despite reaching the finals of the 2009 World Grand Prix and Las Vegas Desert Classic, it is now two years since Van Barneveld won a major title. In that time he has been struggling with illness, regularly changing his darts, and frequently suffered from a highly-visible crisis of confidence on the oche. Anything other than perfection leads to a frustrating shake of his head, and his affection for the game appears to waver like a floating voter. The 2010 UK Open Finals next month will, alongside the Players Championship and Championship League, be the third significant tournament in eight months which he has effectively chosen to opt out of.
(Qualification for the UK Open Finals is based upon participating in a minimum of three of the eight qualifying tournaments leading up to June. Van Barneveld played in the fourth, on 21 March, and recent events may have precluded his entry on the most recent dates, but his earlier decision to miss both February tournaments now prevents him from securing a place in Bolton.)
His position as world number 2 is safe for the next couple of months, but he will do well to keep an eye on those players moving up the rankings. Mervyn King, Colin Osborne and Paul Nicholson have all beaten Taylor in the last year, and Simon Whitlock has run him close. If Barney was to slip outside the top 3 in the rankings before the World Championship – highly likely without a good performance at either the Matchplay or the World Grand Prix – the likelihood of being in Taylor’s half of the draw would increase. As John Part, Wayne Mardle and Roland Scholten have discovered, the pole to claw your way back up the rankings is extremely greasy.
Darts is better when Barney is playing well. His extraordinary talent cannot be written off, but something needs to change or it’s not totally impossible that he’ll find himself waiting on one of the two wildcards for the 2011 Premier League. And if that happens, his attitude to the sport over the last year or two – let alone the effect of the recent events thrust upon him – would suggest that he may need some persuading to accept it.