Some years ago, I resigned my entire Christmas and New Year’s viewing schedule to live sport. Sick to the teeth of The Chase, Home Alone and special editions of entirely “mid” sitcoms, I decided that the only way to cope with the onslaught of schmaltz would be a punishing and totally unsentimental schedule of boxing, football and darts.
Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s developed the same coping mechanism. On the day of the PDC World Championship final (3 January), the stars of the festive period have been the men (and boys) at the oche. Now a decade into an enormous hype cycle, the competition has become one of the last mass-culture events in Britain, with Luke Humphries and Luke Littler’s final match-up last year becoming Sky’s most watched non-footballing event in history.
It’s hard not to compare the two sports, wildly different though they are. In fact it’s possible that darts is taking up some of the void football has left behind as it moves increasingly towards data dumps and huge, NFL-style rosters of teenage “ballers”. The Premier League will always remain popular, but it has lacked a compelling competition narrative in recent years. Even the Mary Rose-esque collapse of Manchester City hasn’t offered up much excitement at the top of the table. At time of writing, the most interesting part of the league is not the title race (which Liverpool is dominating), but the ongoing decline of Manchester United – as well as Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou’s transformation from an emotionally intelligent Ted Talk type to a Bukowski-coded racetrack gambler. The Premier League has been a dead rubber for a long time, but this year feels particularly pointless.
Here, darts presents an exhilarating alternative, one that has captured the hearts of an audience starved of real entertainment. Not only did last year’s winner, Luke Humphries, go out to a 54-year-old with a Mohican, it has more characters than The Wire and drama woven into the rules of the game. Now free from the grinding dominance of Phil “The Power” Taylor – who ruled over the sport like a particularly disagreeable barfly at your local – professional darts is an open, unpredictable scene loaded with weird and wonderful talents, all with their own narratives, habits and foibles.
First and foremost there’s Luke Littler, the teenage wizard who lives on pizzas and vapes, and spends his winnings on FIFA packs but carries himself like a wizened member of the local Rotary Club. Then there’s his opponent in the final, Michael van Gerwen, an unusually competitive and aggressive player looking to recement the GOAT status that slipped from him some years ago. There are other eccentrics too, like the 70-year-old Singaporean Paul Lim, and the 40-year-old Robert Owen, an Iceland delivery driver by day, who had to get a friend to cover his shift so he could compete in a latter-round match.
Darts is also loaded with 20th-century athletic pizzazz in a way international sport has veered away from: pom-pom girls, walkout songs, singalongs, four-pint pitchers, town-crier announcers – all with a distinctly British sense of humour running beneath it. There is some rivalry and trash talking (mostly on behalf of Peter Wright), but it sits in a nice middle ground between the tedious professionalism of track and field and the grim animosity of mixed martial arts and boxing. The whole effect is something between a heavyweight title fight and Bongo’s Bingo – a high-street incarnation of a Wagnerian opera, only without all the hate-mongering.
Because there are no draws, and because you have to finish on a double, there are “moments” in almost every game; the two semi-finals on 2 January saw Van Gerwen pulling out a 158 checkout, and Littler bettering it with a 170, ending with what one commentator called “the most dead-centre bullseye I have ever seen”. And even if a player loses, like Nathan Aspinall did, they can still lead the crowd in a rendition of “Mr Brightside”. To deploy a word you might not have associated with darts some decades ago, it’s a level of inclusive excitement it’s hard to find anywhere else.
But still, many people don’t quite get it. For them darts is simply not athletic enough, too white, too boozy, too British, too resolutely uncool. Many long-term fans are also queasy about the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) turning the sport into a huge annual pantomime, and long for the days of smoky rooms and dirty tuxedos. They cringe at the light shows and Smurf outfits. And they worry that darts is becoming a little too “matey”, with Aspinall and one of this year’s semi-finalists, Stephen Bunting, cracking jokes and bumping fists with Littler. Perhaps a little more needle, a little extra bite is required, to take the sport into “Rumble in the Jungle” territory. Let us hope that Van Gerwen will provide some of that tonight.
Make no mistake, though, darts is in the ascendancy. The former PDC chair Barry Hearn has pointed out that many youth clubs are steering their attendees away from the brutal world of academy football, and towards the comparably open field of darts. And yesterday, walking through the streets of London, I saw something I thought I’d never see: a group of teenage boys, all in JD Sports’ finest, carrying a freshly purchased dartboard. “Jumpers for oches” or not, darts has conquered Britain.
[See also: Why be depressed about the state of football?]
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