Gary Anderson has blasted Gerwyn Price as a ‘clown’ ahead of their hotly anticipated World Series of Darts quarter-final showdown at Glasgow’s Braehead Arena on Sunday afternoon.
The two-time world champion produced a classy display to defeat Chris Dobey 6-1 on Saturday evening to set up a crunch clash with ‘The Iceman’. Anderson averaged 103.57, posted the solitary maximum and converted 75% of his attempts at double, to end a run of back-to-back first-round exits at the World Series of Darts Finals.
Price’s progress to the quarter-finals was far less serene. He edged out reigning World-Youth champion Corey Cadby in a tempestuous last-leg decider, in a match dominated by exuberant celebrations, which appeared to over-shadow the darts itself.
Anderson and Price last met in a Players Championship event back in March 2016, with the Scot romping to a whitewash 6-0 win, and he’s relishing the prospect of taking on the UK Open finalist in front of a partisan Glasgow crowd.
‘The Flying Scotsman’ insisted: “Bring it on. I just want to get up on stage and play darts, if he wants to give it that’s entirely up to him but I’m going up to play my darts, and hopefully play well.
“We’ll play darts. I’m not the one who’s going to jump about the stage like a clown. If you hit a 180, that’s what you’re supposed to do, it’s not to showboat up there, so we’ll see what happens,” said the Scot, who labelled Price as a ‘circus-clown’ in a newspaper interview with Phil Lanning in the Scottish Sun Sport.
The world number three continued: “Nowadays you’ve got that many players that can win it, the standard of players now…Phil’s packed his bags up, Michael you know. Adrian Lewis is struggling now but he’ll come back. There’s so many players now that can win a tournament.”
However, Anderson insisted that he was relishing being back on home soil. He added: “Back in Scotland; great. You only get a couple of tournaments a year here. I play all over the world, and to be back playing on your own ground, you cannot beat it.”
Nevertheless, Price will thrive on the underdog tag and is seeking to reach his third televised final of 2017, following on from reaching the UK Open Final in March, and the World Cup of Darts Final in June, where he and Mark Webster lost out to the Dutch duo of Michael van Gerwen and Raymond van Barneveld.
Reflecting on his win over Cadby, ‘The Iceman’ claimed: “Obviously he’s a good player, but I give a little bit of stick now and again but not every single pitch and maybe I got to him from giving it every single pitch because he was doing it, and maybe if he tones it down a little bit then he’ll be a very good player.”
Elsewhere on Sunday afternoon, defending champion Michael van Gerwen takes on Rob Cross for a place in the last four, in a repeat of last weekend’s European Championship final. Third seed Peter Wright meets World Grand Prix champion Daryl Gurney for the tenth time this year, whilst James Wade faces Belgian hotshot Dimitri van den Bergh.
Photo Credit: The Scottish Sun/PDC
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