This is a review of the Two Volume book on the complete records of the Embassy and Lakeside World Darts Championship from 1974 to 2012 the first 35 years.
The book has been reviewed by Dr Patrick Chaplin and this review is shown below:-
BOOK REVIEW – LAKESIDE - THE COMPLETE RECORDS
A review by Dr. Patrick Chaplin
It is my pleasure to pile praise on a genuinely unique piece of darts research.
Back in the late 1980s, the then editor of Darts World magazine, Tony Wood, and I had a discussion during which time he told me of his dream to write a ‘Wisden of darts’, a book recording every county match and major darts tournament and a Who’s Who’ featuring biographies of top players.
This we decided would be an herculean task and I recall thinking at the time that even attempting to compile a complete record of the Embassy (later the Lakeside) World Championships would be impossible.
Well I can now announce that the latter is possible and has been done.
An ex-BDO stalwart and long serving organiser of darts, Colin Saunders has proved that and succeeded in such a fashion that it takes your breath away.
Colin began the task of documenting the Embassy/Lakeside at the turn of the millennium with, as he recalls, ‘a lot of enthusiasm and a very naïve belief that it would probably take three years’. In point of fact it took Colin more than four years just to collect the information and set up a system to deal with the hundreds of thousands of fragments of data he was able to cull (with the assistance of others) from BDO records and former colleagues’ brains.
Throughout the next decade Colin held on firmly to the belief that the Embassy/Lakeside World Professional Darts Championship should be fully documented. At the beginning he could not understand why no one had done it before - but now he does!
Ten years on and the fruits of his intense labours has resulted in not a one- but a two-volume mega-work titled Embassy and Lakeside World Professional Darts Championships 1978 to 2012. Volume One is subtitled Yearly and Accumulative Statistics and Volume Two The Score Sheets.
Every single dart thrown and who threw it and against whom, every single player that ever toed the oche, every set, every high and low outshot in the Embassy/Lakeside between 1978 and 2012 and much, much, so much more is there; indeed, every single
fact you could ever want to know about the world’s most prestigious darts tournament is
within either the 322 pages of Volume One or the 538 pages of Volume Two.
The book also features many images by one of Britain’s best darts photographers, Steve Daszko plus colour images of the front covers of every programme since that first Embassy at The Heart of the Midlands nightclub in Nottingham back in 1978.
In his Foreword to the books, Bobby George calls Colin’s work ‘a labour of love and patience’.
That’s undoubtedly true but over and above that these books constitute a masterwork and an indispensible reference work that all serious-minded darts fans and
journalists and those who genuinely care about the history of our sport should possess.
I recommend it to you all without reservation.
For full details of this amazing two-volume work,
Embassy and Lakeside World Professional Darts Championships 1978 to 2012
(the volumes can be purchased individually or as a set)
visit Colin’s website www.dartbydartbooks.com.
Dr. Patrick Chaplin
Author and Darts Historian
www.patrickchaplin.com
(This review first appeared in Dr. Darts’ Newsletter, Issue #28, August 2012)
I have included an introduction on the Book
I started the project of documenting the Embassy World Darts Championship just over ten years ago, and at the time started with a lot of enthusiasm and a very naïve belief that it would probably take about 3 years.
It took me just over 4 years to get all the information for the history and to set up a system to ensure I would get information from the continuing years, and I have to say I never lost any of the enthusiasm I started with.
The years went by and a book that looked like 300 pages grew into 500 then 600 I followed by this by thinking this is going to be heavy and then went from one volume to two volumes and the number of pages grew and grew. There are many things I have not been able to put in these first two volumes, and in fact I think another book with player’s interviews (a lot of which I have already done but did not have room to include them) and effects the championships have had on players all over the world but this maybe for another time.
Over the ten years I have gone from the highs of reading old score sheets (I found these to be the most interesting) and reports, to falling asleep at the computer typing in the records, to a feeling of, I do not what to be doing this! As I tried to proof read 100’s of pages of numbers I had already type in, but the best moment of all was the great satisfaction I felt when I picked up the first proof copies.
I may still have got it wrong but that is for you to decide, but with the effort I have put in I have to say I do not think I could have done any more, so I hope you enjoy the history of the greatest darts event for the last 35 years, an event that has done more for Darts Worldwide than any other.
Colin Saunders
