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Michael van Gerwen and Dave Chisnall in 2016

Sliding Doors Moments in Darts: When a Demolition Man couldn't blow up an immovable object standing in Dave Chisnall's way

By Paul Nicholson

16:05 · THU September 26, 2024

Dave Chisnall has added four more titles to his exceptional career tally of 26 this year including two in September but it remains one of the biggest injustices in darts history that none of those are majors or even televised.

The world number five has been one of the PDC’s most popular characters ever since joining the ranks back in 2011 and has enjoyed a highly successful career, winning at least one title in all but four of his 14 seasons – and one of those was the Covid year.

His lack of majors isn’t due to an inability to perform at his best on a stage because eight of those titles have been on the European Tour.

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Chizzy has also reached six major finals and in five of those he’s been unfortunate to come up against Phil Taylor (x2) and Michael van Gerwen (x3) while his most recent opportunity was the 2022 Masters when he lost a close battle with Joe Cullen 11-9.

Overall, Dave has been in 50 PDC finals. Fifty. This is what people have got to understand when it comes to the most famous yellow adorned player that we've ever had. This is a Hall of Fame career without any majors.

No one can level ‘choking’ on the big day at him but the whole issue of never winning a major must be taking its toll because he’s seemingly asked about it every time he gives an interview.

Most sports have quite a lengthy list of contenders to be the ‘best player never to win a major’ but in darts, he’s in a league of his own. Terry Jenkins reached nine major finals but ‘only’ won 11 titles and nobody would doubt Chizzy is a superior player.

He’s even won more titles overall than most of those who have a major!

So just imagine what his career would have looked like had he got the job done many years ago.

You can even go as far back to his BDO days when he lost 7-5 to Martin Adams in the 2010 Lakeside final and had a chance to take out 126 in the deciding leg of the 12th set to go 6-6 but he was unable to reach a double.

Finale - Martin Adams - Dave Chisnall

Had he won that leg and nicked the deciding set then he’d have arrived at the PDC as a major champion and he could have used that confidence to strike quite soon just like Raymond van Barneveld and Glen Durrant managed to do in different eras.

If you sow the seed of success early, it's amazing how things could be different and his CV would now look completely different.

What if Michael Van Gerwen had lost that 2014 World Championship final against Peter Wright. Would he have gone on to win three anyway? Maybe not. Peter Wright might have gone on to win five rather than spend several years waiting for his first major.

But, we’re going to focus on a different sliding doors moment in Dave’s career that he had no control over.

2016 Players Championship Finals

In the penultimate major of the 2016 season, Dave Chisnall found himself in the last four of the Players Championship Finals and just two wins away from finally getting the job done.

Prior to his clash with Peter Wright, Chizzy had to watch Michael van Gerwen take on big outsider Darren Webster in the first semi-final.

At that stage of Webster’s career, he’d only previously reached one major quarter-final and that was way back at the 2007 World Championship, while he’d never won a PDC title of any kind.

The Demolition Man would later reach three more major quarters (the worlds in 2018 and back-to-back World Matchplays in 2017 and 2018) and would pick up a Players Championship title in 2017 – but it’s fair to say this was a shock run at the time.

He’d only averaged above 95 once during the tournament while MVG had produced three big 100+ averages, including 108 against Raymond van Barneveld in the quarters.

Nobody gave Webster a chance.

Webster V van Gerwen [SF] 2016 Players Championship Finals

Incredibly, the underdog raced into a 6-0 lead in a race to 11 to leave the darting world speechless. Darren was swimming in confidence and Michael was in big trouble.

Had Darren completed the job rather than only manage to win two win of the next 13 legs, then Chisnall would have been a huge favourite to become a major champion.

Chizzy beat Peter Wright 11-8 with an average well over a ton whereas Darren

Having got over his semi-final scare, MVG came back out and averaged 108 in a crushing 11-3 victory over Chizzy, who didn’t exactly play badly with an average of 99.

We can't say Chizzy definitely would have beaten Webster but we can say he wouldn’t have been up against that level of performance.

van Gerwen v Chisnall [HD] 2016 FINAL Players Championship

That wouldn’t have been a normal thing for Darren to do. We've seen Herculean efforts in Minehead finals before from Danny Noppet, Gary Anderson, Daryl Gurney and even Ryan Searle in defeat.

But if Chisnall played Darren Webster in that final he’d have become a major champion at last.

We have no idea what his CV would have gone on to look like in this scenario, but the confidence you gain from winning is something you cannot replicate in any other way.

Look at Michael van Gerwen as recently as this month. Having not won a ranking title all year, he wins a Players Championship in Wigan and follows it up with a European Tour title in Budapest. Does he win in Budapest if he hadn’t won the week before? I don't think he does.

Personally I won titles in three different seasons during my career and in 2011 I won three titles in the space of three months. If I didn’t win the first final against Adrian Lewis I’m not sure I would have got the second and the third titles.

And look at Michael Smith winning the Grand Slam just a couple of months before becoming World Champion. Yet another major final defeat wouldn’t have set him up well for the Ally Pally at all.

His belief and confidence was through the roof and allowed him to unlock his full potential on the biggest stage of all.

I have every faith that Dave will eventually win a major title. I think it's a story that has to be told.

Reaching 50 finals and winning 26 of them deserves a major at the very, very least.

There's going to be a tournament where it does happen, and there's not one person on planet darts who's not going to be happy. I have every faith that one of the best players I've ever seen will be a major champion, and I hope it's a massive one.

It would be an absolute injustice if he doesn’t.