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Michael van Gerwen blasts ‘crap’ rival after World Championship loss: ‘Time to retire’
Michael van Gerwen has urged Peter Wright to consider retiring after the former two-time World Champion suffered a shock defeat to Arno Merk.
Wright, who knocked out defending champion Luke Humphries en route to the quarter-finals last year, has endured another tough season on tour, which has seen him slip down to 30th in the world rankings.
The Scot has failed to get past the second round in five of this year’s televised majors, while he also failed to even qualify for the Grand Slam of Darts for the first time since 2012.
Wright beat Noa-Lynn van Leuven 3-0 in his opening game of the tournament, but the 55-year-old was well below-par in his second-round match, sliding to a shock 3-0 defeat to World Championship debutant and World No. 163 Merk.
‘Snakebite’ fired in only two 180s during the contest, while his 79.20 average was the lowest he has ever recorded in a match at the Ally Pally.
Had Wright won, the veteran thrower would have set up a third-round encounter with his long-time rival, Van Gerween, after the Christmas break.
And the Dutchman said that Wright should now consider stepping away from the sport, insisting the Scotsman has been playing ‘crap’ for a long while now.
‘I’m not really surprised by his performance because he’s been playing crap lately,’ Van Gerwen told reporters after his 3-1 win over William O’Connor.
‘I think it’s time for him to retire anyway.’
Wright has failed to go beyond the quarter-finals in any televised ranking tournaments in the last two years, but former World Champion Gary Anderson said his fellow countryman should be afforded time to rediscover his form.
‘We can’t play well all the time. People think we’re robots and you’ve just got to play well all the time or a bad couple of games it’s ‘he’s finished, he’s retiring’,’ Anderson said.
‘Just give folk a break, you know. We can’t keep doing that day in and day out.
‘We’ve seen Michael van Gerwen do that for probably the last decade. He has a blimp and it’s ‘that’s it, he’s finished’.’
Meanwhile, former darts player and Sky Sports pundit Wayne Mardle urged Wright not to jump to any decisions after his ‘awful’ performance.
‘It was an awful watch – watching a champion, a legend of our sport, someone who has helped the sport grow, I didn’t enjoy it one bit,’ Mardle said.
‘I don’t know what questions Peter will ask himself – whether it’s like ‘it’s fine, I will carry on. I love the game’. And I hope that happens.
‘He’s always said ‘I don’t want to retire, I love it’ so I don’t want him to have a knee-jerk reaction because it’s happened at the World Championship.
‘If you play like that elsewhere, it’s OK. You don’t really think about it but when you do it at the World Championship, and I know this because I’ve done it, you end up questioning whether you are good enough to compete ever again.
‘And it’s about competing, about winning. He’s a winner. I hope he’s OK because you will think about that. That sleepless night stuff, I hope he doesn’t make one of these knee-jerk reactions like we have seen from other players.
‘He’s been a classy ambassador for darts – brings that fun but also brings that amazing ability and a touch of class.’
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