Now we know for sure. And maybe we’ve always suspected that on some level, from the moment a 16-year-old kid arrived at these championships on a wave of bubbles, hype and good news and started doing whatever he wanted.
From Phil Taylor to his hapless rivals at youth level, anyone who has seen Luke Littler throw darts will tell you he is the sport’s next giant. But sometime in the future. Not now. Of course not now.
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But at half past nine on the second evening of 2024, the future spectacularly and violently transformed into the present. On Wednesday evening Littler will play Luke Humphries in the final of the Professional Darts Corporation world championship and it feels inevitable and feels like it comes from a completely different reality.
2018 world champion Rob Cross was by far his strongest opponent, ranking among the top 10 players he faced in the entire tournament and the first man to truly push Littler to his limits. And in the end he vanished like the others, with the score at 6-2 in sets and Cross leaving the arena with nothing but a nice check in his hand and a funny story to tell the grandchildren.
Cross didn’t play badly. In fact, he had a great performance: a great start, an average of 103 in doubles, 42%. But he faced a player who was not only better than him, but visibly and embarrassingly better than him. Littler averaged 106 and struck out 47% of his doubles, but really the numbers tell the simplest story here. This was a youngster’s way of playing and making fun of one of the best in the world: going for single-16 at 36 to surpass his favorite double-10, going for 180 at 182, hitting a double bullpen for 132, throw shooting. The threat and pleasure of a child who knows in his bones that the arrogance of his darts can cash any check he writes.
Afterwards, he was a 16-year-old boy again. He gave slightly different answers to the same slightly different questions he faced throughout the tournament. And frankly, why not? Perhaps the last person who can put this achievement in any perspective is Littler himself, who has made 105-plus averages and out-of-this-world perfection the norm. If you want to measure the intensity of a storm, you look at historical records and examine the destruction and destroyed buildings it leaves behind. You can’t hold a microphone to the wind and ask it to explain itself.
What we can now say for sure is that darts changed forever in these surreal few weeks. The 2007 final between Taylor and Raymond van Barneveld, the sudden rise of Fallon Sherrock, the greatest leg of all time between Michael Smith and Michael van Gerwen: all this moved the dial, broke new ground, opened the door of the sport to other futures. . However, never before has a new talent made itself known in such a loud and exciting way. Van Gerwen was magnificent in winning the World Masters at 17, but he was not this brilliant, not this confident, not this instantly untouchable. The average age of a world champion during the PDC era is 38 years. But this is Littler’s world now, and somehow everyone in it—past, present, and future—feels fancy.
And yet. The only cloud on this seemingly endless horizon appeared after 90 minutes, when Humphries defeated Scott Williams 6-0 with one of the most comprehensive performances ever seen on the Alexandra Palace stage. His average of 109 was the ninth highest in world championship history, and his 18th consecutive victory saw him rise to No. 1 in the world rankings.
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Humphries became the world’s most outstanding player last year, a triple major winner, and increasingly feels like his time has come. But Wednesday’s final will be a completely different challenge from anyone he’s ever faced: a player he’s never faced on stage, a crowd that will be determinedly hostile to him, an opponent still developing and who will ruthlessly punish any mistake. It’s much easier to look like a million bucks when you’re punching the World No 52. This is less easy when you know you have to find 12-dart legs to sustain your shot.
And on one punishing evening, Cross discovered just that. He was really into it at the start: racing out of the blocks with balance, flash and power scoring. It took until the sixth leg of the match to record his first triple-free visit, by which time Littler had already reached six points and was trailing in sets for the first time in the tournament. Littler, in contrast, was starting to leak the odd dart into the 5-way bed and complaining of a draft throughout the stage. This was perhaps the first small chink in the armour.
But Littler has such courage and talent that he can throw himself back into the zone in a single visit. After Cross missed a dart in the bullpen to win the second set, Littler calmly made a 74 to tie the match and never trailed after that. The crowd roared their little gladiator child onto the stage and roared him off the stage again. And on Wednesday night, they will return, along with millions of people around the world, with the irresistible aroma of a great sports tale.