Mid-afternoon, and with excitement building ahead of the most hotly anticipated game of darts in at least one of the finalists’ lifetimes Luke Humphries, newly-crowned world No 1, was dragged away from his preparations to deal with some questions from Sky.
“The sport deserves the things that are happening,” he said, “and if I win tonight it’s great for the sport because you’ve got the world No 1 who’s proved his worth.” Yeah, nice try pal. Humphries may have been by a margin the outstanding performer in the sport over recent months, but in the buildup to this game nobody was seeing him as the sport’s salvation. He was just the bloke who had to answer questions about Luke Littler. And, a little later, he was the bloke who answered the Luke Littler question.
In mid-afternoon Sky Sports News interrupted their usual broadcast to bring their audience live footage of Littler arriving at Alexandra Palace. And so it was that viewers watched the juvenile arrowsmith, having emerged from his car, putting on his coat while facing the other direction. There was literally no detail of Littler’s journey small enough to be ignored.
From mid-afternoon a reporter was stationed at St Helens Darts Academy, where Littler had honed his skills as a younger child. He would occasionally be tasked with asking one of the finalist’s vague contemporaries how excited they were. “For us here, it’s massive because he’s one of our own,” someone called Matty said. “I’m not surprised but I am at the same time.”
There is no point playing it cool. Over the last fortnight we have witnessed something completely unprecedented, something joyful and ridiculous, unforeseen and unimaginable. Littler was the kid who made children of us all, who got us all dreaming. On Tuesday the viewing figures for his semi-final comfortably outshone those for the night’s single game of Premier League football, which to be fair was not the most exciting example of its type. You don’t get goalless draws in darts. But with the attention ramped up another couple of notches for the final some became a little giddy. “He does what he wants to do! Freedom! He’s got freedom of mind already! In a world final! At the age of 16!” roared Wayne Mardle as Littler attempted and completely fluffed an outlandish double-bull finish during an opening set in which he played like a well-lubricated punter in a really good Luke Littler costume.
But the speed with which fortunes swing in this sport is bewildering, and in no time at all Littler held a 4-2 lead. “Here we go!” Mardle yelled. “I said it was going to be a bumpy ride. Buckle yourselves in!” Humphries lost the sixth set in such miserable style that Mardle lambasted him for his abject and irredeemable uselessness – “You’ve got to be more settled than that, Luke. Wow. You could literally see that he wasn’t throwing properly”. About 45 seconds later he nailed a glorious 170 finish, and from there he barely missed a thing.
Still there were mini-swings, bumps in the road, and in that same set, the seventh, a Littler checkout of 122 briefly felt decisive. “That could be the one that breaks the No 1’s heart. Look at his face. That was just spiteful, it was nasty, it was dirty,” we were told. Approximately two minutes later Humphries had won the set and the face we were looking at was Littler’s. “That could be the moment we look back on in this match,” said Sky’s commentator, Dan Dawson.
When the real key moments arrived they were completely obvious. The double two missed by Littler that might have put him 5-2 up was obviously one, later identified by Humphries as “a massive turning point”. But we knew the battle was over when Littler, 2-1 up in legs midway through the 11th set and needing to win that and all the others to take the title, hit 58, 58 again, 45 and then 60 in successive visits. Against a player averaging 103.67, that kind of stuff simply will not do. A matter of seconds later it was over.
After his victory was secured Abi Davies interviewed Humphries on stage, then interviewed Littler, then interviewed Humphries again. “The whole day I was thinking: ‘Get this one now because he’s going to dominate world darts soon’,” grinned the champion, still answering questions about Littler. But for all the multiple interviews Davies still ended the night with a few questions apparently unanswered, foremost among them whether it should be “‘Cool Hand’ Luke Humphries” or “Luke ‘Cool Hand’ Humphries”.
Meanwhile in his final world final the referee, nominative determinism’s Russ Bray, savoured every call of 180, rolled each of them around his mouth like the smoke of a fine cigar, as if desperate never to finish exhaling. And there were plenty of them, more than any previous final.
Bray, fully half a century Littler’s senior, has a voice so abrasive it makes Sean Dyche sound positively dulcet, and he pneumatic-drilled his way through 36 maximum calls across the evening. We will remember this tournament for the youngster who found an unforgettable way of announcing himself, and perhaps also for the veteran who had an unforgettable way of announcing.
