Double tops: Lukes lead way but world darts championship field is wide open
May The O2, Betmgm Humphries Littler Date: Luke 2024 League (left) At Play The 2024 During The Thursday 23, Premier Off Final And Luke During Picture London
The double two. At the end of the seventh set. Luke Littler’s on 58, two darts left, but he thinks he’s on 68. He hits the treble-18. Realises what he’s done. Steps away. Steps up. Misses the double two that would have put him 5-2 up in the world championship final. Loses the next five sets in a row. In his idler moments Littler sometimes watches this match back, and this is the point at which he has to turn off.
There’s a good case for anointing that double two as the most famous missed dart in the history of the sport. It’s either that or Michael van Gerwen’s double-12 after 17 perfect darts in the 2014 semi-final. The point is that nowhere else does so much taper down to so little, so quickly. Over the first year of his professional career Littler has thrown – at a rough estimate – about 30,000 darts in competition. Most are instantly forgotten. But some you remember.
The rise of the 16-year-old prodigy was the story of last season’s world championships, perhaps one of the great underdog stories in sport. As Littler macheted his way through a kind draw, a wave of hype and hope began to gather at his feet, hoisting him to some of the most deific levels of darting artistry ever dreamed. There were tall tales and midnight kebabs, songs and memes, VIP selfies and bleary-eyed slots on breakfast television. Darts was cool. Darts was in. Darts was the story. And yet, as a result of that missed double two, it is a story that remains incomplete.
If you’re one of those folk who tunes into this sport once a year, then you’ve missed plenty. But the broad contours of the sport, the prevailing vista, the mood music, are essentially as you left them on the evening of January 3. There are two Lukes at the top. Then a little clear water. And then everyone else.
This in itself was no guarantee, given the immense flux that has defined the sport for the past five years. By way of illustration, the 2010's saw 11 first-time major winners (and none at all between 2012 and 2017). This decade, despite being less than halfway through, has already seen 15. The field of potential winners is wider than at any point in history. Which gives you some idea of the standards Littler and Humphries have set this year to pull clear of them.
To his four major successes last season Humphries has added the World Matchplay and Players Championship Finals (his first successful major defence), while also missing match darts against Dimitri Van den Bergh to win the UK Open. He could lose every match between now and next summer and still be world No 1. Just as importantly he has been a magnificent, tireless ambassador for the sport: generous to his rivals, honest about his flaws, desperate to win without ever needing to beat his chest about it.
And even the brilliant Humphries admits that on form, nobody can touch the kid at the moment. Now a venerable 17 years of age, Littler claimed the Premier League title in May, hitting a nine-darter against Humphries in the final, before sweeping to victory in the World Series of Darts finals and the Grand Slam. He won his first Pro Tour, European Tour and World Series titles. No player in the world’s top 50 can boast a winning head-to-head record against him.
“He’s playing the best darts,” Humphries says. “But it doesn’t mean he wins everything.”
And this, perhaps, has been the other theme of a wildly entertaining 2024: beyond Littler and Humphries, pure chaos. Reputations have been worth nothing. Gerwyn Price didn’t get past the last-16 of any major and kept dropping cryptic hints about walking away from the sport. Van Gerwen and Peter Wright ended the year with just a single Euro Tour title each to show for it. Michael Smith had another horrific season and is in danger of dropping out of the world’s top 16. Between them, this quartet won 59% of all the major titles from 2014 to 2023. None of them can safely be written off. But their era of predominance feels done.
Meanwhile, new names entered the winner’s circle. The crowd-pleasing Stephen Bunting scored his first big win at the Masters. Mike De Decker, the heavy-scoring Belgian, claimed the World Grand Prix. Ritchie Edhouse began the year as the likeable world No. 58 best known for wearing a compression sleeve on his throwing arm. He ended it a major winner, after a shock triumph in a carnage-strewn European Championship.
All of which poses a pointed question. Who exactly is the world’s third-best player right now? Littler reckons De Decker. Humphries reckons van Gerwen. You could probably also make a cogent case for Gary Anderson, who has been posting some ridiculous numbers on tour this year and pushed Littler all the way in a hall-of-fame semi-final at this year’s Grand Slam. And the reason this is a particularly urgent question is that because of the vagaries of rankings and the draw, Humphries and Littler are scheduled to meet in the semi-finals.
Smith is the No. 2 seed, but most bookmakers do not even make him favourite to emerge from the third quarter of the draw. The vogue selection here is the 24-year-old Dutchman Wessel Nijman, who has had a storming year on the Pro Tour after serving a 30-month ban for match-fixing. Nijman has talent to burn but his big stage displays to date do not yet justify the hype invested in him. Meanwhile, Price, Chris Dobey, Josh Rock and Jonny Clayton all lurk in this section.
The bottom quarter looks the most open. Van Gerwen and Anderson could set up a delicious last-16 clash, but look out too for Martin Schindler, a double winner on the Euro Tour this year. Van den Bergh is one of those players who can easily go on a hot streak, and there would be few more popular winners than Dave Chisnall, still toiling away in search of that first major title after six losing finals.
De Decker and Bunting look like the main threats to Humphries in a star-studded top section that also includes Wright, Damon Heta and the resurgent Dirk van Duijvenbode. Littler’s route to the semi-final will probably take him past Edhouse, Danny Noppert and Rob Cross. All could conceivably trip him up. And yet over a long set-play format, if Littler finds anything near his top form, it’s hard to envisage it actually happening.
On paper, Littler beats all comers for the next couple of decades. But this is not a sport of machines but of humans, with human frailties. A few weeks ago, at the launch for the 2025 world championship, I asked Littler whether he still thought about the double two in last year’s final. The boy king sighed heavily. “Any need?” he eventually replied.
Maybe not. Maybe last year’s defeat was just a kink in the road, a forestalling of the inevitable. Maybe Humphries is the Dennis Priestley of his era, a last roar of defiance against the gathering storm. Littler could win five world titles, or he could win 10, or he could win 20. But the first is always the hardest.