A year ago, Luke Littler’s Ally Pally ascendancy was almost disconcertingly smooth, as though shepherded to fame and glory by fate itself. Now? Not so much. No-one is helping him get anywhere. In fact, everyone’s going above and beyond to stop him.
Conquering the world is never easy, but does it have to feel this hard? Littler said after Monday night’s victory over Ryan Joyce he found a “10th gear”. Formula 1 cars only have eight.
This is where he is having to go, the levels being demanded of him. Three consecutive dartists have now produced among their finest recent performances against The Nuke. Playing against him inspires and requires that.
Luke Littler's toughest opponent is the expectation of perfection
Read MoreThe disjointed nature of set play can give matches the feeling of a great war played out of an hour, each leg a daring foray behind enemy lines. This was dogged and brutal and exhausting, every action met by an equally and oppositely destructive reaction.
Littler’s power-scoring remains peerless – here were 14 180s, 26 more visits over 140 and another 25 over 100. An average of 103.14 was his 15th over 100 in his past 16 competitive matches.
But he has faltered a tad on the outer ring of late, and this is where Relentless was always going to match or better him. Littler wins games by brute force, shooting first and asking questions later. Playing against him presents a similar mental challenge to boxing – how to breathe and focus when you’re being repeatedly hit in the face.
Joyce is steadier but more precise and purposeful, and this is how he stayed in this last 16 match – death by a 1000 doubles. Every Littler mistake was punished, and even plenty of his treble-hitting matched bar-for-bar.
And yet, with the double 12 which has so often deserted him in recent nine-dart attempts, the 17-year-old lived to fight another day, producing his best when it mattered most, as he so often does. Three games lie between him and the Sid Waddell Trophy, and his regular partner-in-genius Luke Humphries will be watching from home after defeat by Peter Wright.
If you want some indication of just how much this is testing Littler, just look at the primal roar he emitted upon winning. You want to call it animalistic, but this comes from somewhere fundamentally human, an exorcism of pain and anxiety and doubt, the sweet release from a sport which psychologically tests its players like no other.
Just compare it to his celebrations a year prior, an innocent mixture of shock and joy.
Against Andrew Gilding in the second round, he screamed and smiled; against Matt Campbell he just laughed.
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Read MoreAfter toppling the great Raymond van Barneveld, he looked up to the darting gods and believed they were looking back. Brendan Dolan got a head-bob so nonchalant most would’ve missed it. In the semi-final dispatching of Rob Cross, it was another searching stare to the stars.
But this was deeper and rawer than anything we’ve seen before from Littler, on a day he went places he’s never been before. Between beating Joyce and winning the final three legs to edge past Grand Prix champion Mike de Decker en route to winning the Grand Slam, he now knows he can win from anywhere. That makes him even more dangerous.
Three former world champions and three more ranking major winners remain in the field. Unseeded Callan Rydz is the only relative unknown remaining, although he has produced the best individual performance of this tournament and also reached the last eight in 2022.
Littler will play a resurgent Nathan Aspinall in the final game on New Year’s Eve, perhaps his closest friend in elite darts, a fellow Manchester United fan under the same management. The pair have played eight times this year, mostly in the Premier League – the younger man won seven of those.
Michael van Gerwen is now second favourite, perhaps the only man remaining who could genuinely match Littler at his best, whose talent is in a similar strata.
And yet this is not the same MvG who won three world titles in six years. The aura is not there, the unwavering consistency, the destructive single-mindedness. He has been there and done that, and is now talking about missing his kids over Christmas. Littler does not have the same concerns. He is still the kid.
Stephen Bunting is the only other player in the draw to have won a TV major this year, and he looks cheerfully ominous, like a teddy bear who’s surreptitiously trying to kill you. Either he or Wright would be Littler’s semi-final opponent.
But the boy wonder’s premier adversary remains the weight of expectation and his own mind. The Sid Waddell Trophy is now his to lose.
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