So the Premier League bowed out with a bang and a bull’s-eye! Congrats to MvG on winning a great final with a great finish and also on thoroughly deserving it by his performance over the whole 15 weeks. But if the night at the O2 proved anything aside from the brilliance of the Dutch pretender to the throne of the King of Darts, it was that you should never underestimate The Power when it comes to the crunch. A millimetre here or there and he might have topped a generally indifferent (by his standards) campaign with yet another title.

In the last years of the nineteenth century there were reportedly two things no one believed. One was that Martians were planning to invade the Earth. The other was statistics.

Last time I recklessly brandished some dodgy mathematics at you and thus provided some hopefully helpful hints for the more vertically challenged player. This time it’s the turn of the horizontally challenged – by which I don’t mean the impressively endomorphic, but those who shun the middle of the oche like it was a trapdoor to a pit of crocodiles.

One of the really good things about darts is that most people can compete on more-or-less equal terms. Male or female, old or young, large or small, you can still be a top class player.

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to my first blog of the year - a blog for which it’s always easy finding good darting topics as the World Championships can be relied upon to highlight a range of them. And the 2013 events were no exception!

So what comes round this time of year and starts with Ch? Yes, it’s the Championship of the World!

Call me a luddite, or maybe just anyone from the early 19th century, but so far I’ve mostly managed to avoid submitting to the siren song of social media. Nonetheless, despite being on neither Facebook nor Twitter, when Unicorn post notice of my blogs thereon, I must admit to sometimes having a crafty peek at the responses.

I’ll start this month’s blog with a trivia question: what does your average dart player have in common with Shania Twain? Before your mind ill-advisedly overlays the lyric “men’s shirts, short skirts” with an image of Hairy Harry from The Bricklayer’s Arms, I’ll answer for you – it’s that they’re not impressed (much) by rocket scientists.

One of the good things about my job is that it can sometimes involve a pleasing combination of work and play, no more so than when a new design of dart needs testing. After all the physical measurements are measured, all the aerodynamic calculations are calculated, and all the trajectory characteristics are characterised, there’s simply no substitute for that final experimental procedure - picking up a set and throwing them at a board, lots of times.

So The Power ended up winning the World Matchplay with his Phase 5s, having dabbled with some “Phase 7s” en route without great success. Worth an explanatory blog, I reckon!