Recent Challenge Tour winner McDonald on curtailing darts career initially: "I started to struggle financially with the cost of the tour"

Shaun McDonald continued his return to darts with a successful opening Challenge Tour weekend picking up his first title in the PDC after only returning to the sport at the turn of the year.

But due to the Challenge Tour format, he couldn't appreciate it fully before playing the next event.

"At the time when I won it, I don't think I got to fully appreciate it because there was two events in a day and that was the first on Sunday," he said to the Weekly Dartscast.

"They were also trialing starting the second event from the semi-finals of the first event so I knew the second event had started and I'd be on pretty much straight after. I probably didn't get a chance to reflect on what I'd done until the evening once the darts was all done."

The Scot has re emerged winning the 2002 Winmau World Youth Masters: "Memories of back then they're still sharp in the mind. I was thrilled to win that event, I was a very good youth player.

"I'd won pretty much everything in Scotland and I'd actually got to the Quarter-Finals of the World Youth Masters the year before. Following our match was the Last 16 of the men's event so all the players had arrived so it was cool to practice with them."

Path from there

His path from there saw McDonald play some PDC darts but he soon left the sport to become a chartered accountant mainly due to the cost of it before returning after lockdown.

"I did try and go as far as I could at that time. I played quite a bit of BDO and PDC after that. I tried to qualify for anything I could. At that time it was my ambition to try and get as far as I could in the game, ultimately I wasn't good enough at that point.

"I didn't have enough backing. I hit a bad spell in the PDC, I started to struggle financially with the cost of the tour. Darts really took a back seat from there."

"I was surprised about how quickly I picked it up again and the sharpness came back. I hadn't played anything for 10 years at all. Once I was getting a little sharper, I thought I'll play a little bit of online stuff and I got into a private league."

"As the deadline came for Q-School, I thought do you know what I'm going to go and see how far off I am."