2 days Ago By The Guardian
Deep down, we all knew this was going to happen at some point. From the moment Luke Littler stepped through the doors of Alexandra Palace in 2023 and started throwing darts from the gods, a countdown had begun that would ineluctably, irrevocably end with the Sid Waddell Trophy hoisted aloft in his arms. And yet, with the moment potentially hours away, the thought of it still seems somehow unreal, illusory, transgressive.
Darts is on the verge of a new age, a tectonic shift in its history and popularity and cultural footprint. Eric Bristow, Phil Taylor, Raymond van Barneveld, Michael van Gerwen: turns out this was the preamble. When the chroniclers of the future come to write the tale of this sport, they will recognise two eras: before Littler, and after.
It’s not only his talent, although the talent is otherworldly, and it’s not only his youth, although the youth is startling, and it’s not only the speed of his rise, as violent and concussive as this has been. In almost every aspect, this is a player rewriting the traditions and truisms of darts, rejecting everything we thought we knew about it. That this a trade and not an art, a skill to be honed and hardened over years, not a kind of fully-formed perfection that emerges like a flawless debut album.
That this apprenticeship is typically served in the pub, and very often liberally topped up in the practice room before the start of play. That stagecraft – the process of commanding a wild and often hostile crowd – is the last and hardest of all the disciplines to master. That playing to the gallery will inevitably end in embarrassment.
That you should really try and avoid leaving double 15 if you can possibly help it. That nobody wins the Premier League, the Grand Slam and the World Championship in their first full season in the sport. That nobody cares about darts.
Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Certainly the great Van Gerwen would like to think so, as he tries to align the stars for a fourth world crown, a restoration to the throne that once felt like his by birthright. Van Gerwen refers to Littler as “Wonder Boy” and you wonder if there is a part of him that would relish this triumph more than any of the 47 other major titles he has won to date: an opportunity to stand in the path of the great wave and push it back with his own two hands, just as an aging Taylor did to the emerging Van Gerwen himself in 2013. In order to do so Van Gerwen will have to play better than he has played for years, better than he played in despatching Chris Dobey 6-1 in the evening’s first semi-final, better than the twinkly-eyed Stephen Bunting did in losing by the same scoreline against Littler in the second.
Bunting averaged over 100 and could probably argue he deserved better than the thrashing he took. But it was a brutal lesson in vanishing margins, a reminder that against Littler the window of opportunity is so narrow it may as well be a trick of the light. And Bunting did have his chances.
He had a chance to win the first set by taking out 92, missed two darts at double eight in the second set that allowed Littler to break, missed double 13 in set four that would have given him the darts in the deciding leg. Over the whole match his checkout rate of 36% probably needed to be a good 10 points higher. But the cruellest blow was a dart he could do nothing about.
Sitting on double top at the end of the sixth set, and hopeful of reducing the gap to 4-2, Littler pulled out an 84 finish on the bull, celebrating by reeling across the stage, slamming his fists together and basically offering out the entire crowd in the car park afterwards. “It was a good shot,” he said afterwards with his characteristic understatement. “It just had to go.
” Littler finished with an average of 105 and you could still argue – as in his previous matches – that we’re still yet to see the very best of him. In many ways he has looked more human, more of a teenager, . Now everyone expects.
Now he does too. A storm is coming to the Palace on Friday night. There will be a television audience of millions, people who have never watched darts before, people who may never watch darts again.
And of course this is never over until the last arrow is thrown. But Van Gerwen is playing more than an opponent here. How do you stem the tide of history? How do you possibly contain something that has not the slightest sense of its own boundaries?.
