ALEXANDRA PALACE — Luke Littler grimaced, snarled, swaggered, puffed his chest, ground his teeth and ground out a win. He played to the crowd, dancing and smiling and clapping in dispatches, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He was not quite his best and not quite himself.
And yet he also finished with the highest average of the day at Alexandra Palace, an aggressively fine performance by his standards still better than any of his peers. This is all part of the Luke Littler Experience, another day in perhaps the oddest office in England, a precision sport in a hall of chaos.
His victory over 54-year-old Ian White – who used to beat Luke’s grandfather Phil Littler in the Runcorn darts leagues – had a similar shape to his second-round win over Suffolk barber Ryan Meikle.
There was the overwhelmingly, unsettlingly adoring reception, the uncharacteristically slow start, multiple missed opportunities for his opponents to pull away, stealing victory in the first set and deservedly losing the second. He averaged 73 in the first three legs and hit just 26 per cent of his doubles in the opening two sets.
Both White and Meikle played at the outer limits of their capabilities for large parts of the game, unsettling and harassing the crowd and bookies’ favourite, but this is something he is gradually becoming used to.
And so came the push, the inevitable ascendancy, the reversion to type. There was no record-breaking final set here, just enough to win by a distance, at a canter. 12 more 180s takes him to 22 for the tournament so far, the most of any player.
Littler has long been stuck playing two opponents – both the player beside him and the expectation hanging over him – but the latter is becoming increasingly relentless and unforgiving.
What started as a collective dream, a vague concept of expanding what could be possible in darts, has become a grinding reality where only perpetual perfection will do. One poor visit or one poor leg and the prodigy is raising an eyebrow to the crowd, huffing and puffing, perplexed as to how this could possibly happen.
This was Littler’s first match in his last 15 in which he averaged less than 100, and the slow start triggered a false sense of disaster, an unnerving and unnecessary wave of doubt. What many players consider the pinnacle of performance has become his benchmark, with his 140.91 final set against Ryan Meikle pushing the theoretical ceiling even further. Winning 10 titles and over £1.1m in your first professional year will do that.
This is, of course, a natural consequence of his brilliance – and testament to it – but it’s something he clearly has not yet made peace with. He always wants to be better, never ok just to be ok. This is stage on which every match last year – bar the final – appeared almost effortless.
Under the heightened scrutiny of the recent weeks, his performances increasingly feel like hard work, shorn of some of their fun and shine.
“It’s good for myself to show that I can be ruthless,” he said post-match of his snarling and fist-pumping.
“I am not a nice person at times on the board. I don’t think anyone else is. But it’s always good to have that a bit of aggression.”
Every Littler match is now an absurd showpiece, provided prime-time billing and prime-time audiences for what will often be run-of-the-mill events. This would have been utterly unremarkable were Littler not involved, instead it will undoubtedly be the most-watched game of the round.
The world watches because they know what could happen, that magic is on the cards and mischief afoot. When it never arrives, when this just becomes another day, there’s a palpable sense of disappointment. He feels this just as keenly, with one match left in 2024 to hit a record fifth nine-darter, ever desperate to entertain.
Even Littler’s next opponent, Ryan Joyce – who is only outside the world’s top 32 on account of a fear of flying so petrifying it keeps him away from lucrative European Tour events – said the boy king could win their game without being at his best.
And there’s every chance he will do so, even if Joyce will further discomfit him and take some of the opportunities White placed the wrong side of the wire.
But this all feels very serious, in a way it never has before with Littler. His second-round tears were just another sign this matters to an extent it never has before.
Part of this is the expectation he will lift the Sid Waddell Trophy, perhaps just as much that he will do so in constant style, without dropping a set, hitting more 180s than ever before, with the odd nine-darter. We only remember the true highlights of the past year, flattened by nostalgia into an “all hits, all the time” reel which doesn’t remotely reflect reality.
The sooner both he and the crowd realise this is not so much unrealistic as impossible, the freer and better he will perform. Making peace with his astonishing past – and the possibility of both failure and occasional mediocrity – is the key to an even more extraordinary future.
