Nieuwlaat is impressed by De Sousa: "He can certainly become world champion"

Jose de Sousa has been one of an emerging crop of players before and during the Coronavirus pandemic with 'The Special One' recently reaching the Premier League final and also winning back-to-back Players Championship tournaments.

"I already saw at Q-School that he was good, I was able to follow him fairly well in those days," said darts commentator Jacques Nieuwlaat at Sportnieuws.

'The Special One' is not immediately known as a scoring genius and Nieuwlaat does not see that changing immediately. "He will never learn that again. Look, if you dart for so long and you still can't count, you'll just never learn it again."

Soft-tip switch

There are reasons why De Sousa only broke through in the PDC at a later age. "He has been playing soft tip darts for a long time and he was really good there. He also won a lot of tournaments there," says Nieuwlaat. "They can earn good money with soft tip darts and it is immensely popular there (Mediterranean countries, ed.). If I lived there, I would also go soft tip. Then you can sit outside, while you have to be inside at the steel tip darts."

"In soft tip darts, the machine counts for you, of course, so De Sousa didn't have to ask or calculate anything from the caller," Nieuwlaat continues. "So I think he just simply forgets to ask sometimes. His coach should really tell him, 'If you don't know, you should ask'. That's really the only solution, because he really has no idea."

Very good under pressure

Despite the bad math, De Sousa has worked his way up to an absolute top player. "He is very good under pressure. You often think: 'now he will miss under pressure'. But he hardly misses any darts under pressure. Except for calculation errors, he does almost nothing wrong, technically speaking so all in all it's a complete player."

Nieuwlaat believes that De Sousa will remain at the top for a maximum of five years. "He can certainly become world champion. But someone like Dirk van Duijvenbode can do that too. I can name 50 more. Look, if you have won a major once, I mean a World Championship, the World Matchplay or the Grand Slam , then you can always win those tournaments," concludes Nieuwlaat.