Van Gerwen seizes big moments to knock out resilient Rydz in epic

They call 1 January, world championship quarter-final day, the greatest day in the darting calendar.

- Jonathan Liew

Well: come back in another 364 days to see if there's been a better match than this. Michael van Gerwen is a semi-finalist again, beating Callan Rydz, and if the headline facts feel unremarkable enough, then rarely, if ever, will he have been challenged and interrogated as he was here.

Rydz, perhaps the outstanding performer to this point, was magnificent, outdoing the great Van Gerwen on almost every conceivable metric. He won 18 legs to 17. He averaged 104 to van Gerwen's 103. He edged checkouts 46% to 45%. He hit 17 180s to Van Gerwen's 14, at a rate of almost one every other leg. He showed bottle beyond belief, levelling at 1-1, again at 2-2, then pulling one back to trail 4-3 when everyone assumed Van Gerwen would cruise to victory.

The talent was always there. Anyone who saw Rydz in his 2021 breakout season will know how hot his hot streaks can run. But somehow he was never quite able to take the next step. They called him soft, surly, lacking in backbone. Nobody will ever be able to say that about him again.