Leg-by-leg updates from the inal at Alexandra PalaceWright ‘ready’ to shock defending championSend your thoughts to Rob by email here 5.51pm GMT
Hello. Everyone’s looking for an angle these days, a slightly different take on things that makes them seem more interesting than the average keyboard warrior. But sometimes you just can’t ignore the obvious. Take tonight’s World Championship final between Michael van Gerwen and Peter Wright. You can’t get past the fact that it’s a serial winner against a serial runner-up; that, when these two meet in a final, it invariably ends with Wright saying “I’ll get him next time” during a rueful post-match interview.
Wright is a magnificent player, one of the best never to win a world title, but his reckon in major finals is desperate. He has lost 12 out of 13, ten of them to van Gerwen, and it is cruelly symbolic that the only time he did win a major – the 2017
UK Open – was when van Gerwen was absent through injury.