Top 10 darting stars of 2020: Paul Nicholson reveals his top 10 eye-catching performers of the season

Paul Nicholson reveals the the 10 players who have impressed him most this season as we gear up for the 2021 World Darts Championship.

In his latest Sporting Life column, the Asset reflects on an action-packed 2020 which has thrown up many different winners of events, new stars emerging from nowhere and relative veterans finally fulfilling their potential.

Nicholson reveals the 10 players who have impressed him most but there is one notable omission!

10. Damon Heta

A lot of people expected Damon Heta to come through Q School back in January due to his success at last year’s Brisbane Darts Masters, and not only did he do that, but he showed more glimpses of what was to come for the rest of the year.

Therefore, I’m not shocked by how far he’s climbed the rankings in such a short space of time and he’s the latest player from Australia to prove that the DPA’s blueprint to help new talent blossom is working.

He’s now won on the stage and floor environments, just like Simon Whitlock, Kyle Anderson and myself have done in recent years – and he certainly won’t be the last.

Damon has made multiple runs to ranking finals as well as picking up his maiden Players Championship title while his impressive results in the World Cup and the Grand Slam of Darts shows he’s now able to take that form onto the larger stages.

He’s looking like a genuine future top 16 threat and he’s here for the long term. He could well be the successor to Simon Whitlock as Australia’s flagbearer in darts.

The way he plays is a joy to watch and his technique – which has been scrutinised a lot now he’s being seen more on TV – is almost flawless. It’s graceful, stylish and I’d go as far as comparing it to Louis Oosthuizen’s golf swing which is quite the compliment!

It’s just a small part of the whole machine – he’s a cool cat, he’s relaxed, has an incredible focus that I’m almost jealous of and also possesses a great personality.

He’s brought a new element of what Aussie darts is about. Whereas the likes of myself, Kyle Anderson and Corey Cadby have been in your face and somewhat smash mouth, he’s completely different!

There are no limits to what he can achieve and I have no doubts that more titles are on their way.

9. Dirk van Duijvenbode

It’s obviously been a breakout year for him and not just because of his run to the World Grand Prix final, even if that was somewhat unexpected.

If you look into his pre-lockdown form in 2020 he was bound to do something rather big although I guess we all thought he may struggle with the sterile behind closed doors atmosphere.

He hasn’t been able to do the kind of pumped up walk-ons in front of fans that made him so popular and also charged up his performances on the European Tour.

He’s made all this great progress on the board in front of the TV cameras without being himself – which says to me he’s now ready to reach another level.

I always thought he was the kind of player who wasn’t able to perform unless he was jacked with loads of adrenaline – and he’d probably say that himself – like he did in Belgium for the opening European Tour event of the season. He was flying and finding his mojo.

However, when he started to play behind closed doors on the floor and stage, he still managed to find it, so maybe he’s educating himself about how good he really is. I’m very excited about his future.

He was the first graduate of 2020 Q School to break into the world’s top 64 this year – even ahead of Damon Heta – and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

I love watching him and commentating on him because he stands out and gives us something different to the type of player already out there.

If the pandemic finally dissipates in 2021 and we have a packed house in Rotterdam for The Premier League, then Dirk would be a Box Office Contender. Can you imagine the scenes for his walk-on?!

8. Devon Petersen

This time last year Devon Petersen was doing a lot of punditry for Sky Sports at the World Championship and I just wonder whether he thought ‘I’m not ready to sit here yet. I’ve still got a lot to give on the board’. He was right!

He’s done a great deal in 2020 and there’s so much to admire with the technique and mentality he’s improved and worked upon.

Devon is all of a sudden knocking on the door of greatness and having become the first African to win a PDC ranking event, he’s already made history.

He’s carrying a continent on his shoulders but maybe he’s used to that pressure in the way Michael van Gerwen is used to being world number one.

This is a breakout year for him but there could have been even more titles which is why I haven’t put him in any higher than eighth. We saw at the Winter Series that if he’s played too much or tries too hard then he can tire and fall off that 100 average wagon quite quickly. He’s got to manage how many tournaments he plays and has to put some constructive breaks into his game.

When the exhibition circuit gets back under way in full force, Devon will be in much higher demand than ever before so his timetable will have to be handled with care to allow him the perfect mix of competition, practice, rest and enhancing his brand. Some managers in the past have ruined some players by booking too much and hopefully this wouldn’t happen to such an entertaining talent like Devon.

In terms of future majors, I really do think his best chance of winning one in years to come would be the World Championship because he loves set play, which suits his power-scoring wheelhouse, plus he has very good darts fitness. If he is to have a scoring lull in a match when his technique falters, then set play is the better format to have one.

7. Simon Whitlock

Every time Simon Whitlock is slipping down the rankings in alarming fashion, something happens in that guys brain to say “I’m not finished yet”.

He’s like the Undertaker in wrestling who keeps finding another level at Wrestlemania!

Simon is probably one of the best opportunist players I’ve ever seen and he proved that at the World Matchplay where he just scraped in and went on to thrash Michael van Gerwen, while he was even more fortunate to qualify for the World Grand Prix due to Covid-19 enforced withdrawals and there, he beat him again!

If that wasn’t enough, he qualifies for the Grand Slam of Darts via the last-ditch qualifier and overcomes MVG for a third time just when it looked like he’d be a victim of revenge!

However, I want to go a bit further back to when he played Scott Mitchell at the Summer Series in Milton Keynes. It was one of the best floor games I’ve seen all year and I thought ‘if you keep playing this well, you are going to have a good year’. However, during the Summer Series we kept looking at his in-running rankings and didn’t think he’d even make the World Matchplay because he kept losing when playing well.

Now he’s got the results to back up his performances – and those victories over MVG were more to do with that and his aggressive game plan rather than Michael being below par. He clearly has a spell on him.

I think it’s amazing that he’s still up in the higher echelons of the sport at this age despite all these new, younger players flying up the rankings.

Despite all these great wins, he was unable to reach a final – including the World Cup – but I still think his overwhelming feeling will be one of defiance. He’s proved people wrong and will keep working harder than ever to stay in the top 16 in the world.

6. Glen Durrant

It has been a blockbuster year for Glen Durrant due to winning the Premier League and pocketing the biggest cheque of his career of £275,000 – but he can’t break into my top five because he hasn’t done much else. As unfair as that sounds.

Glen will be disappointed his success this year is ‘only’ that and even more disappointed that it’s not ranking money. He may look back at 2020 and think it should have been even better.

With that in mind, he’s won the longest Premier League ever and I love the way he handled the pressures and experience as a debutant. Once he got to the top it was very reminiscent of his time in the BDO when he didn’t let such a position slip.

He then conquered what will go down in history as one of the most attritional Finals Nights ever but who cares about that – they don’t write the quality level on a trophy. He had greater staying power than anyone else and he deserves so much credit for that.

I don’t think he put all his eggs in the Premier League basket, but he put most of them there because it was such a golden opportunity to win a major PDC title that he craved since moving across from the BDO.

Only great players get their names on that trophy and its fitting that one of them is now a three-time Lakeside champion who has taken to the big time like a duck to water thanks to his incredible mental strength and hard-working ethic.

I think Gary Anderson ended his wait for a first PDC major with the Premier League and after that he went major bonkers so I wouldn’t rule that out happening with Durrant, especially when he’s rested and back to full fitness after his illness with Covid.

The effect that has had on him has put him under the radar ahead of the World Championship but 2020 has seen a lot more crazier storylines than the Premier League winner lifting the Sid Waddell Trophy!

5. Jose De Sousa

Jose won his second ranking title of the season in style at the Grand Slam of Darts and there’s not one person on the planet – except James Wade – who would begrudge him that.

He’s turning into a huge fan favourite with his style of play, barmy counting and just how he does things his own way – and we love him for that. We don’t want players all being robots.

I didn’t know a great deal about Jose until three weeks ago when I had an inadvertent breakfast with him for about 15 minutes at the Winter Series while on commentary duty for the PDC. I absolutely adored the guy and got to know a bit more about him, such as his giving up carpentry to make darts his full-time job. I loved his work ethic and his attitude to the sport, and how he also lets his darts do the talking for him.

He’s like everyone’s favourite uncle who has gone and done something extraordinary by making a major breakthrough as a somewhat newcomer aged 46. He’s also an example of how well the PDC have done in terms of trying to find talent from other places in the world that never really got the opportunity to make it in big time darts.

The strangest thing for me about Jose’s rise to stardom is that I shared a practice room with him back at the World Championship two years ago ahead of his clash with Michael Barnard, which was infamously awful! It was so bad and so long that I got more grey hairs watching it than I ever did playing the game!

We’d been previously told by scouts in Spain that he had annihilated the qualifying field of around 400 so we all thought he’d give Barnard a pretty exciting game and we couldn’t have been more wrong. Maybe those reports about the qualifier were embellished or maybe it was just an off day.

But when he came through Q School and he started showing signs of promise on the tour, we were thinking “they were right all along!” It was just one bad day at the worlds. The following year he also lost after getting a stinker of a draw against Damon Heta so he’s still not won a match at the Ally Pally yet – but that could all change this year.

Jose has turned into an entertainment machine and I would love to see him in the Premier League in 2021 in front of fans because he has everything you need to get them on their feet.

4. Dimitri Van Den Bergh

Let us first marvel at the fact that Dimitri Van Den Bergh is now a top 10 player from relatively nowhere at the start of the year after winning just one ranking event!

He’d done some pretty good things by reaching a few TV quarter-finals but his floor form was largely disappointing and we’d started to wonder where his was career going whilst lots of other rising and emerging stars were starting to grab the headlines.

There were lots of question marks surrounding him, even as recently as the start of the World Matchplay, which he only qualified for by the skin of teeth!

Nobody was putting money on him to win it but, as it turned out, he coped better with the behind closed doors major environment than anyone else.

Dimitri looked fantastic again during much of the Grand Slam of Darts with some incredible averages and it was another sign that becoming a major winner will give him a new lease of life and confidence when it comes to the biggest tournaments.

However, despite having these runs in the bank, he’s still a bit of an enigma to me. When he’s on top form he makes the game look like child’s play but for some reason he can quite as easily average in the depths of the 80s! The question marks are now about how consistent he can be.

Spending the first lockdown in Peter Wright’s house certainly helped. You don’t spend months in the company of the world champion and it doesn’t rub off. When he came away from the snake pit he obviously found some keys to success because Wright is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to mindset, technique, focus and equipment. He has lots of tools to teach people.

Although he’s not living there now, he’ll be working on everything he learned to improve his all-round game and focus to become a top 10 player for a decade, minimum.

3. James Wade

Whether you like him or not, James Wade deserves a lot of credit for answering his critics yet again and the season still isn’t finished yet.

He made the European Championship and Grand Slam of Darts finals, which earned him a lot of ranking money despite losing both, and he did also won a Players Championship event since darts resumed.

Every time he’s snubbed by the Premier League he seems to come up trumps and remind everyone that he’s still very much a force in the world of darts.

He’s now back up to seventh in the world rankings while he’s been in the top 16 for about 15 years, even during his ‘lull’ times. Can you imagine the kind of talent you need to stay this high in a sporting elite for this long whilst also coping with your own demons? It’s quite incredible. I can’t even remember when he was last outside of the top 10, and if he was, it wasn’t for long. 

You’ve also got to bare in mind that he’s also had the pressure of defending big pay cheques from two years ago so to do that and stay inside the top eight is a superb achievement. 

When he finally retires, although he’s won so many big titles in his career, one of his biggest accolades will be staying towards the top of the rankings for that amount of time. And don’t forget, despite being a veteran of the sport, he’s still got potentially another 15 years ahead of him.

My biggest achievement was reaching number nine in the world and I wasn’t there very long!

However, he really wants that world title to leapfrog the fellow greats in the game that were also unable to achieve it. On current form, I’m not sure he’ll do it this year but he’s going to go darn close.

2. Gerwyn Price

You may think I’m strange by not putting Gerwyn Price as number one considering he’s won the World Grand Prix, the World Cup, the World Series and all sorts of other titles in the best season of his career.

He may not have defended the Grand Slam but to win the double-start World Grand Prix that he doesn’t even like was a phenomenal effort – and I loved his reaction to winning the World Cup with Jonny Clayton.

His 2020 story is still not finished and he wants to end the season as world champion, which will help him on his way to achieving his ultimate dream of becoming world number one.

Price will go into the World Championship under pressure because people will expect him to win it because of the form he’s shown this year, but his sporting background has helped him become almost conditioned against ‘choking’. That’s not normally – if ever – the reason behind any of his defeats.

He doesn’t often miss his match or title darts, which has now given him so much positivity, belief and confidence when he encounters his future highly pressured situations.

1. Peter Wright

Peter Wright started 2020 as world champion – and deservedly so after all his years of success, hard work and improvement – and it seemed to lift a lot of weight off his shoulders to help him go from strength to strength.

It’s like he’s becoming the player he could have been 10-15 years ago if he’d have known what he knows now.

When Peter won the European Championship recently, he was on a different level compared to anyone else and he made it look easy. That’s when you know a darts player is at the top of their game and Peter has been like that for a while now.

Even though he hasn’t won as many titles as Price this season, some of that has been down to taking wise rests because at his age he knows he can’t play to the same schedule anymore.

Both players are knocking on the door of becoming the next world number one and it may just boil down to what happens at Ally Pally.

Wright is more likely to do it because he knows how to and there’s still much more to come from the Snakebite story.