Countdown to the 2009 Southern Masters

In one months time the top players in the SDA will meet and compete to be crowned the first ever Southern Master.

The preparations of the players have been mixed. One of the new additions, Gary Rogers has had a frustrating time losing consistently to Pinder over recent weeks although he did get a 5-2 legs victory. This was preceded by a 5-0 loss and followed by a 5-3 loss. His preparation has also been hampered by the removal of his dartboard and the changing of his darts. It waits to be seen how costly these changes are.

Not much has been heard of the other new player, Tom Bailey, although rumours have been surfacing that he has bought new darts and dartboard in order to get some much needed practice. His only recent outing was a humiliating 10-1 defeat to Pinder.

Talk coming from the Riggs camp is that he is hitting 140 scores for fun in practice. However he been unable to get much game time practice as he has been preoccupied with study and it will be interesting to see whether he can take his form from the practice board to the match board.

Hitchen's build up was thrown into chaos this last weekend when he was only able to get 5 legs in with Barnett of which he lost all but one. Hitchen will have to hope that those long nights spent on the soft tip board can help him when it comes to the real thing.

Barnett claims that he has now found his ideal technique, throwing like the great Bobby George, although this may have changed by the time people read this. Unlike Riggs his practice was not affected by study and he has even had time to invent a Golf practice game and is working on a Snooker version.

There is absolutely no word from the Blind Jonny camp and is unknown whether he is busy practicing or just knocking one off over button with one hand and playing the harmonica with the other.

As for the Pinder camp, things are looking good with several 50 plus average games and several convincing victories. The one fly in the ointment is that practice time has had to be given to writing a wedding speech and general wedding organising.