It was a wild and festive atmosphere at the People’s Palace, the kind you get when the darts is back, the crowd is still drinking off last night’s hangover and the result is not remotely in doubt.
They came to praise Luke Littler, not to bury him, and the 16-year-old from Warrington duly obliged by dispatching the gallant but outmatched Fermanagh’s Brendan Dolan by five sets to one. As the tables emptied, the venue reverberated to the strains of “Walking in a Littler Wonderland” (and yes, at some point someone is going to have to come up with a better chant than that).
In so doing Littler became the first debutant to reach the semi-finals since Nathan Aspinall five years ago, and the youngest player by far. How much longer does this tale have to run? He plays the 2018 champion Rob Cross on Tuesday night, the first time he will have faced a top-10 player on the stage, and will start as favourite. Then, after the defeat of Michael van Gerwen, one of Scott Williams and Luke Humphries in the final. Then, only another 15 more world titles to chase down Phil Taylor, and the whole of the rest of his life to do it in.
But we’re getting grotesquely ahead of ourselves here, because Littler’s victory was really only one half of the story. Yes, the raw numbers – an average of 102, rising to 122 in the second set, a checkout percentage of 47 per cent – were impressive enough.
Equally, though, he was barely tested by an opponent who after putting out Gerwyn Price and Gary Anderson simply seemed to run out of puff.
Dolan has always been capable of greatness on his day, but there’s a reason he has only reached one major semi-final in the past 12 years. Here again it was consistency on the treble ring that deserted him, as he averaged just 86.45, the lowest seen in a PDC world championship quarter-final for 15 years.
He actually won the first two legs of the match, breaking Littler with a 101 checkout. But thereafter he was steamrollered by a player who is beginning to add a certain stagecraft to his remorseless accuracy.
“A darts robot,” was how Raymond van Barneveld described Littler after his fourth-round defeat on Saturday night. And throughout the history of darts there have been players who can simply step up and throw, a metronomic excellence that seems to exist entirely independently of the situation or the opponent.
But Littler is not one of those. In fact, this is what makes him such a frightening prospect. He is not a robot but a pure matchplay animal, able to modulate and raise his game to the moment, capable of playing the mental game, increasingly adept at using the stage, just as Taylor was at his peak.
He loves flamboyant finishes, loves to hear the roar of the crowd, wants to demoralise and destroy opponents as much as he wants to beat them. At one point he finished 302 in six darts: five treble 18s in a row, and then a double 16 to finish. This too is talent, as much as any average or milestone.
There was a moment in the first set when he threw a 15 to leave himself the 170 maximum checkout, flung the first two darts into the 60-bed, and then turned to face the crowd, milking the moment for everything it was worth. He knew what they wanted. He knew he was going to give it to them. And he wanted them to know he knew.
In the event, he missed the centre of the board completely and hit the skinny 11. But that showman’s touch, that lovely arrogance – think Usain Bolt winding down with 40 metres to go in the Olympic final, or Shane Warne announcing a batter’s dismissal before it happens – offers a tantalising glimpse of the kind of player he may yet become.
What can stop him? It’s almost certainly going to need a three-figure average and a monster doubling performance. Cross, a weird, awkward mad scientist of a player who loves nothing better than trashing a narrative, is capable of that. But can he score heavily enough to give himself the chance? Equally, how will Littler fare if Cross starts nailing his doubles, piling the pressure on to the Littler throw, stretching the game out beyond two hours?
The short answer is we just don’t know. Right now, this could be anything. Littler could be a future great of the sport, the heir to Michael van Gerwen, the man who starts chasing down Taylor’s 16 world titles. He could be a rich and exciting talent who burns out like Adrian Lewis after a few years.
He could regress back to the pack, and the more mortal 90-ish averages we were seeing from him on the Development Tour and in the Modus Super Series. Or we could simply be watching an insane but illusory hot streak, one wild month under the Palace lights that evaporates as quickly as it assembled.
All we know is that it’s going to take a much better player than Dolan to find out. The 50-year-old produced one final act of defiance, nicking the fifth set with a 118 checkout, but it delayed his inevitable fate only by a few minutes. At the end Littler turned again to face his adoring public, arms spread, eyes wide open. Like when you’re the throes of a dream, and suddenly you realise you were awake all along. – Guardian
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