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New League Boundaries.

Many leagues are struggling to gain new teams for a variety of reasons from pubs closing, pubs changing into restaurants and simply a shortage of young, new players coming into the sport. In the past many leagues have broadened their catchment areas in attempts to increase the number of teams. This seems to work for a while, but it does mean that traveling distances to matches become further and further.

In the past when players have gone away on holiday and been due to play in a darts match we have joked about playing matches over the phone with the players and scorers in different pubs or even towns. The players take it in turns to throw and the scorers call the score over the phone to the opposition. A great idea, but very impractical to enforce fair play with no way of checking the scores either end are genuine. However, now we have the Internet with cheap broadband and very cheap Web-cams it should be possible to set up a web-cam on each players dartboard and scoreboard in the opposing pubs. With these on-line, anybody with a computer could watch the match unfold. Cheating would be impossible because it would be all caught on camera. Matches could be recorded onto disc so that cup finals and other important games could be distributed to teams round the league to players that could not attend the competition and there would be no question of incorrect scoring disputes because it would all be there on disc to review the darts thrown.

The big thing would be of course the location of the teams. No more would there have to be a 10 mile limit to teams admitted to the league. They could come from anywhere, not only in Europe, but in the World. Imagine playing teams from Germany, Spain, Holland and even the U.S.A. or Australia in the same darts league! Of course there might be one or two difficulties to overcome, not least the idea of playing home and away games. Language barriers could be a problem with some countries such as Russia or China as not many of our players would understand a Russian or Chinese marker calling out the score over the internet. The scores written on the board may also prove difficult with Chinese pubs joining in as well as pubs in Middle Eastern countries, because some of them don’t use the same alphabet or numbers that we do! Perhaps the biggest obstacle that I can see to this new darts Utopia is the time differences between some countries. It would probably be OK with teams from parts of U.S.A. because they are about 8 hours behind us. This would mean that we would be playing in an evening and they would play at lunchtime. However, traveling East instead of West some teams would be playing not only after midnight, but well into the early hours or even at breakfast! Maybe this would not bother the Australian players though, as I believe most of them like a drink whatever the time of day!

P.S.Since writing this article I have been into Libbys where I play on a Monday and low and behold, the League chairman has installed a camera trained on the dartboard! The match can now be televised and piped through to the big screen TV's throughout the bar. Next stop live feed of matches through the Rugeley Darts League Web-site!