Forgotten Darters: The brief but successful career of Ritchie Davies

In this latest column on DartsNews, we take a look back at Forgotten Darters from the past with the first up being the Welshman, Ritchie Davies who lost out in the BDO World Darts Championship final back in 2003.

In 1992, 21-year-old Ritchie Davies made his big stage debut when he reached the last sixteen at the Winmau World Masters. Yet it would take another five years before he made his debut at the BDO World Championship. During his debut, he went down 3-0 in the opening round against Belgian, Leo Laurens.

However, the Welshman's career had taken off and in 1997 he won his first major title at the Swedish Open. Partly because of this, he was allowed to return to Lakeside but again it went wrong in the opening round, this time Colin Monk was 3-1 too strong. From 1999 to 2003 he was an ever present at the World Championship, in 2000 he got past the opening round for the first time with a victory against Les Wallace, but then ran into Monk again.

After taking out Dutchman Albertino Essers in the opening round, he took out ex-world champion John Walton. In the quarterfinals he defeated an ex-world champion in Tony David and after he beat Gary Anderson 5-2 in the semi-finals, Davies was then into the World Championship final for the first time. Despite the encouragement of his wife, children and a horde of Welsh fans, he lost 6-3 against Raymond van Barneveld.

The day after that World Championship final, however, Davies had to get up early again to do his job as a computer programmer. That was also the reason that we hardly heard from him afterwards. In 2004 he reached the quarter-finals at the World Championship, but after he lost to the Finn Jarkko Komula in the last 64 at the Winmau World Masters, he decided to end his career at the age of 33 due to work commitments.