"I'm predicting myself and Andy Baetens in the final" - Neil Duff's bid for back-to-back WDF World titles gets winning start

Defending champion Neil Duff has made an excellent start to his latest WDF World Championship campaign. The 51-year-old Northern Irishman defeated Dutchman Moreno Blom 3-1 in his opening match.

It was an exciting match, in which Blom even missed some chances in the third set to take a 2-1 lead in sets. "It was one of them games where it could have been a banana skin. So it was nice to go and get the win even if I think I made bit of hard work of it," Duff said in his post-match interview.

Duff was wary of Blom beforehand. "The history that we have, is that we played at the Six Nations and I was pulling my darts out and his dart was whizzing past my head. So I tried to kind of slow that down by just deliberately being careful about taking my darts out," he explains.

"But yeah, he's a class act. He's a young fella, he's still building he's only a kid. I'm at the the twilight years of my career. He's got it all in front of him, but that builds character, builds experience and it'll not be the last time you'll see him on the Lakeside stage."

Duff came to this World Championship as the defending champion. With that comes an extra layer of expectation "I'm still in it to win it. Obviously, there's a massive target on your back and a lot of the players are hoping you're going to get put out early but I'm not going to give them that. I did say when we came here, if anyone wants that title more than I do they're going to have to take it off me. Because I'm not giving that away. I fully intend to be here on Sunday night."

'Duffman' is even already making a prediction for the final. "I'm predicting myself and Andy Baetens in the final."

At the last sixteen, Duff will take on Englishman Martyn Turner on Thursday night.