Things did not begin too well for the Scotsman after Smith flew ahead and secured himself the first set with a 3-1 lead, helping him to build his confidence in the match. Despite this, Smith began to lag behind after Anderson pulled away in the 2nd set winning the first leg smoothly and then pulling off an impressive 101 checkout in the second leg. Smith then managed to pull back in the third leg after both competitors missed their checkouts, which seems to have been a running theme in this match. In the 4th leg of this match, Smith managed to miss 3 consecutive check outs in a row (D8, D4 and then D2) which then gave Anderson his chance to snatch the leg away from him which therefore secured him his first set.
In the third and final set, where Smith and Anderson won 2 legs each, tension began to build further as both players saw themselves missing more and more checkouts, leading to the other benefitting. However, Anderson prevailed and came ahead from Smith who seemed to be very defeated after he was anticipated to be a top contender for the BoyleSports title.
Although Anderson managed to edge ahead and scrape the win from Smith, both had very low checkout scores of 29.17% (Anderson) and 27.27% (Smith). On top of this, Anderson only just had a higher average of 90.89 compared to Smith's 89.13.
After such a heated match, Anderson seemed to be elated about his win in his post-game interview. This comes to a shocking halt when his interviewer questions him about his retirement in which he responds "I will stop when I want to stop" as well as criticising the press and interviewers about "not having a clue" about the behind the scenes of darts players and what it takes to play darts professionally alongside having a life. Despite this outburst, he ends the interview on a positive note and proceeded into his second round match against Mike De Decker.
Unfortunately for the Scotsman, De Decker was in top form and beat him in a tremendous 3-0 win. De Decker took this even further as he managed to make it to the final where he beat World Darts Championship winner Luke Humphries 6-4.
Despite his loss against De Decker, Anderson seems hopeful for future tournaments including the Mr Vegas Grand Slam of Darts and the 2024/2025 PDC World Darts Championship where we can hope to see him in better form and prepared to add another major title to his already long list.
