ALEXANDRA PALACE — On this most hopeful and hungover of days, there was darts. Glorious, brutal, superhuman darts, darts that grabbed you by the collar and called you pathetic, darts that laid bare the great power and fallibility of the human mind.
Roars, resurgence, revenge, rebirth. Destruction and domination. Darts.
Luke Littler flattened his mate. Chris Dobey exorcised his quarter-final demons. Michael van Gerwen proclaimed and asserted his brutal renaissance.
Gerwyn Price, that swaggering, screaming master of mental manipulation, danced in defeat. Stephen Bunting danced, as he so often does, to victory. 3,500 baying fans, impressively inebriated for the first midday of 2025, danced all day and night.
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Read MoreRoutine victory over Nathan Aspinall was secondary to the return of the Littler this stage fell in love with last year, a definite shift in mentality and mood. Until now, he’s been more frenetic and inconsistent, middling on doubles and wildly leaping between feast and famine on trebles.
Yes, he averaged more against Ryan Joyce, and near enough the same as this against Ryan Meikle, but this was calmer, more comfortable, more fun. A 105 first-leg checkout leading into a 111 average to win the opening two sets quashed any murmurs about slow starts.
Here was his trademark easy confidence, 15 relentless 180s, that unbreakable focus. 45 per cent on doubles was another return to form and the norm.
There was still a faint frailty, which occasionally allowed Aspinall the illusion he was a participant in this match, rather than a grinning, willing face for defeat.
But there was never really any sense of trepidation, any fear this could go wrong; it was just a question of how ruthlessly he fancied dispatching his closest friend in darts. Quite, came the reply.
“Start to finish I felt the best I have so far, I was more relaxed,” he said post-match. “I’m playing with absolute confidence, with freedom and now looking on to the semi-finals.” The nerves forced upon him by expectation were gone.
Bunting, darts’ TikTok star, is Littler’s next obstacle. The Bullet waltzed into a 4-0 lead over a Peter Wright, barely resembling the Mohawked marauder who toppled Luke Humphries three days prior, in what may be remembered as the death rattle of his career. 5-2 was a result both deserved.
As he has been all tournament, Bunting was clinical and cheerful. He will be a worthy opponent, but he lacks a few of Littler’s higher gears. If the boy king decides he’s running away with the game, it’s hard to say the Bullet will be able to stop him.
Littler has played in five major semi-finals this year and won all of them. Only eight players ever have played more World Championship matches with a 100-plus average than him, with Michael Smith – who has played at Ally Pally 14 times – the least experienced player ahead. The sheer weight of statistics is not on Bunting’s side, so luck will have to be.
But while the evening session was defined by one-sided exhibitions of ability, of flexing darting muscles, the afternoon was tense and gory and brilliant, a reminder there is no mental challenge in sport quite like this.
Darts stress tests your bottle almost constantly, with nowhere to hide and no fig leaf to protect you. Are you good enough? Are you strong enough? Is your hand shaking? Did you see that 180? Just the £50,000 depends on this throw, no biggie. Remember when you were here before? Remember how much that hurt? Are you good enough?
Dobey was playing against history, against the memory of his collapse against Rob Cross on this day a year earlier. In his way, Price is the 2021 champion desperate to convince himself and the world he is still capable of genius, with waning evidence.
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Read MorePrice won the first two sets, then Dobey reeled off four in a row. Five match darts came and went. Price laughed, then stole the seventh set, an act of psychological warfare. The feeling It Was Happening Again was inescapable.
But despite everything, Dobey found a strength he didn’t possess in previous years. He only needed one more match dart, hitting double-double on 18 to check out 92. The man they call Hollywood is still fighting for his perfect ending.
The same cannot be said of fellow Geordie Callan Rydz. A self-professed “fruitcake” who has nearly left the sport on multiple occasions, Rydz bears the haunted visage of a soldier just returned from a bloody war.
By the end of his all-time epic with Van Gerwen, the Dutchman searching for a fourth world title and the aura which once made darts his plaything, perhaps he had. Both averaged over 103, with 31 180s hit. At one point the tension was so overwhelming, even the crowd shut up. Here were two men transforming anxiety into magic.
“One of the best performances I did in a long time,” creaked van Gerwen, who has not won a ranking major since 2022, after his 5-3 win. “I’m still here and I believe in my own ability.” Based on this, his belief is justified.
There they go; brave and broken, battered and bruised, beautiful and damned. A brain. An athlete. A basket case. Battling with each other, with themselves, with chance.
This was sport as high drama, sport that demanded your eyeballs and attention and emotion. This was darts, and there’s much more where that came from.
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