Anyone who regularly follows local darts will know the feeling.
You look at the results from a venue and think: haven’t those two played each other in the final before?
Quite often, the answer is yes.
With the Q4QS archive now containing thousands of historical tournament records, I’ve started digging into something I’ve wanted to look at for a while: the players who keep meeting each other when tournaments reach the business end.
And even an initial scan has thrown up some remarkable rivalries.
This isn't simply about two good players meeting regularly. To repeatedly meet in finals, both players have to negotiate the rest of the field time after time.
In some cases, they are doing it at the same venue so regularly that the match-up is becoming part of that venue's story.
Turner and Dutton keep finding each other in Wycombe
One of the examples that originally made me want to investigate this was Shane Turner against Stuart Dutton around the Wycombe area.
The numbers back up the impression.
My initial archive scan has found eight finals between Turner and Dutton, with seven of those taking place at Riverside Club in Wycombe.
Those seven Riverside finals are remarkably close too.
Shane Turner 4-3 Stuart Dutton
So despite repeatedly reaching the same final, neither player has been able to establish anything approaching complete dominance over the other.
That is exactly the sort of rivalry these numbers can uncover.
It isn't one memorable final.
It is two players repeatedly getting through the field and ending up staring at the same opponent again.
There is also another recorded final between them in Aylesbury, taking their initial total to eight.
Palmer and Quinn at Sartan
Another pairing I suspected before looking at the numbers was Ryan Palmer and Zach Quinn at Sartan Club.
Again, the archive confirms that they have shared more than one final there.
I have currently identified two Sartan finals between Palmer and Quinn in the archive.
On 19 August, Quinn took the title.
On 9 September, Palmer got the better of the return meeting.
That makes it 1-1 from those two finals.
It will be particularly interesting when I expand this beyond finals, because the next question becomes how often Palmer and Quinn have met in semi-finals, quarter-finals and earlier rounds at Sartan as well.
A rivalry doesn't necessarily begin at the final.
Sometimes the draw gets in the way.
Some extraordinary recurring finals
Once I expanded the first scan across the archive, some much bigger totals began to appear.
Among the most frequent pairings found so far are:
Gavin Sterio v Mike Huntley – 16 finals
Ryan Davies v Stephen Cake – 14 finals
Freddie Rowlands v Jenson Macey – 14 finals
Jake B-Smith v Jamie Chaplin – 13 finals
Dean Taylor v Mat Caste – 13 finals
Those numbers deserve some context.
Reaching one final is difficult enough.
For the same two players to end up facing one another in 13, 14 or even 16 recorded finals means that both have been consistently getting deep into tournaments within the same circuit or group of events.
That is the next part of the investigation.
Are those finals spread across several venues?
Are they concentrated almost entirely at one venue?
Is one player winning most of them, or are they genuinely split?
And how many times have the same players met away from the final?
Venue rivalries could be even more interesting
For me, this is where the data could become particularly interesting for grassroots darts.
National lists are good fun, but every regular venue develops its own cast of players.
Somebody may be one of the strongest players at a particular club for months.
Two players may repeatedly knock each other out.
Another player might continually reach finals but keep running into the same opponent.
We can now start putting numbers against those stories.
For example, rather than simply saying Shane Turner and Stuart Dutton are regulars around Wycombe, I can show that they have already contested seven recorded finals against each other at Riverside.
Eventually I should also be able to answer questions such as:
Which two players have contested the most finals at a single venue?
Who has beaten the same opponent in the most finals?
Which rivalry is closest to 50/50?
Which player has stopped another player winning the most titles?
Which players account for the greatest percentage of all finals at their home venue?
And which opponents seem almost impossible to keep apart?
Nearly 9,000 finals to investigate
The initial archive contains more than 9,600 individual tournament match files, and the first pass identified close to 9,000 recorded finals.
That means this is much bigger than a handful of examples.
There should be enough information to build proper historical profiles of individual venues and the players who have dominated them.
There is some work to do first.
The Q4QS archive contains material gathered through different sources, so I want to separate the ADC records properly and check for duplicate tournament data before presenting any list as a definitive all-time ranking.
For that reason, the national totals above should be regarded as an initial Q4QS archive scan rather than a final official ADC record book.
But the potential is obvious.
The local stories behind the numbers
This is exactly the sort of statistic I want Q4QS to uncover.
A leaderboard tells us who is performing well.
An average tells us how somebody is playing.
But neither necessarily tells us the stories developing week after week at individual venues.
Seven Turner-Dutton finals at Riverside does.
Palmer and Quinn repeatedly reaching the latter stages at Sartan does.
And somewhere within thousands of other matches will be rivalries that even the players themselves may not realise have happened quite so often.
This is only the first dig into the archive.
Next, I'm going to start separating the data by venue and finding the most repeated finals in ADC darts – both nationally and at individual venues.
There could be some very familiar names waiting for each other at the oche.
