The warm, ashy afterglow of a world championship final is the perfect time to reflect and celebrate, but a terrible time to make predictions. It’s a long old season, most of the big prizes are backloaded towards the end, and a lot can happen in those early placeholder months, some of it relevant and some of it not.
Meanwhile, the recency bias is still strong in this one. What happens in the Palace very often stays in the Palace. This time last year a lot of people were talking about how Michael Smith had finally cracked the code and after winning his first world title could go on to dominate the sport for years to come. Often this new era was depicted as a duopoly with beaten finalist Michael van Gerwen, who would surely return hungrier than ever. This time last year the rise of Gabriel Clemens, Germany’s first world semi-finalist, felt inexorable. This time last year there was a lot of buzz about how 2023 would be the year of Josh Rock.
