By 
MICKEY Mansell is looking forward to what is fast becoming his annual visit to Alexandra Palace in London for the PDC World Championships.
The 52-year-old from Clonoe admits that when he first qualified for the biggest event in professional darts back in 2011, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever repeat the journey.
But ahead of his first round clash with American Leonard Gates tomorrow, which will be his 10th appearance at ‘Ally Pally’ he admits that he still feels as if every visit could be his last.
That probably has something to do with his early struggles in the tournament when he lost to Preston Ridd, Phil Taylor, Kim Huybrechts, Jim Long and Seigo Asada at the first stage winning just one leg in the process.
“It has become annual and I’m definitely looking forward to it, there’s no doubt,” he beamed. “At this time of the year, you’d rather be involved in the tournament than at home watching it!
“I didn’t think at the start, when I first went to the tournament that I’d be making this many appearances. Every one, you think there’s a possibility that you might not get back. That’s because, each year you just don’t know [if you’ll be back] so you have to enjoy it to an extent because it is so hard to qualify on our tour. The standard week in, week out is going through the roof.”
Since those early appearances, Mansell has started feeling more at home at the Palace, winning his first round games over Haupai Phua, Ben Robb, Xiaochen Zong and Tomoya Goto to progress to the second stage of the tournament.
And while the next step has proven too steep to scale just yet for the ‘Clonoe Cyclone’, who has lost all four second round clashes over the last few years, falling to Ricky Evans, Peter Wright, Brendan Dolan and Jonny Clayton, he does appear to be getting closer to making it through to the post-Christmas stages.
That’s because in the clashes with Evans and Wright he won a total of one set, while in the encounters against Dolan and Clayton he was defeated by the minimum and, as the old saying goes, on a different day things could have gone his way.
“I’ve been playing [consistently] these last four years and I’ve been going in with a different sort of mind-set,” he observed.
“Early on in my career, there was so much pressure trying to win but now I have a different out-look on it all. It’s about performances and hopefully they create wins.
“The last three first rounds I’ve played very well, I’ve had a few three sets to nil and last year or the year before I didn’t drop a leg.”
This Friday, Mansell will tackle another of the over-50s to have qualified for the World Championships and he is confident of beating Gates, who appears to be something of an entertainer.
“He’s made his name more recognisable here having been on the Seniors Tour over the last three or four years,” Mansell observed. “He had won a few of those [Seniors Tour] tournaments and he’s won something this year because that’s how he qualified, so he must be playing OK.
“He’s a bit of a character, he likes to do a bit of dancing and there’s an authentic way about him, he plays to the crowd a bit.
“He definitely likes to get the crowd involved, so that’s what I’m expecting.
“But I’m confident in how I’ve been playing this year on the Tour, I’ve been very consistent, I’ve been playing well.”
While confident of making it through to round two where he would play either Nathan Aspinall or Lourence Ilgan on the afternoon of Monday, December 23rd, Mansell isn’t looking any further than his encounter with Gates this coming Friday.
“You have to be confident and the last few years, the way I have prepared has worked, so I’ll be going for the same again and think about what happens after that,” he added.
“The first one is definitely the most important one and that’s all I’m thinking about at the minute.
“There’s a bigger picture. There’s obviously a lot of money involved in it now, but there’s no point in looking too far down the road and if you don’t win the first one then nothing happens after that.
“For me, there’s only one thing to be worried about and that’s what’s in front of you at the minute.”
