Luke Littler thrashes Michael van Gerwen to claim historic world title

Tonight the Palace; tomorrow the planet. Whatever Luke Littler goes on to achieve in the fields of darts, celebrity or world peace, nothing will ever quite match the crystalline beauty of this moment. Champion of the world for the first time, the culmination and fulfilment of a dream that has not – if you think about it – really been in gestation for that long.

An ascent this violent and spectacular simply deserved a triumph to match, and in thrashing Michael van Gerwen by seven sets to three, Littler may well have demolished not just one of the greatest players in history, but an entire era. Darts, a game conceived in the pub, may well have been perfected in a teenage bedroom.

What makes this 17-year-old from Warrington so good? A solid base, an economical and repeatable action, the sort of unerring accuracy on the double-10 that would probably qualify him for a medical licence. The ability to slide darts over or under their predecessors, so a bed is never truly blocked. This is the stuff you can see.

But then there’s the stuff you can only really intuit: the aura, the swagger, a flair and flamboyance that simply demands you drop everything and watch. Like the great Phil Taylor, except about 30 years younger and with the ability to throw three darts in about the time it took Taylor to throw one. Who commands from the public not a grudging respect but a kind of instinctive fascination, part animal magnetism and part museum curiosity.

Comparisons with other teenage prodigies are obviously inevitable. But this isn’t Emma Raducanu, because Littler is actually really good, has already won other stuff, will definitely win more. This isn’t Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods, because everyone could see them growing into gianthood from an early age. This isn’t some freak Olympic gymnast or swimmer benefiting from an industrial coaching system and very possibly a state-run doping regime.

In darting terms, Littler is basically your worst nightmare: a kid with the ability to find 180s out of absolutely nowhere, and at the maximally inconvenient time. The ability to expand the board for himself and shrink it for his opponent, forcing them to hit 12-dart legs simply to tread water.

Van Gerwen was simply sucked into the current. He lost by 25 legs to 14, a function not of scoring – which was pretty even – but of finishing, where he checked out just 37% of his doubles. By the end, the triple world champion was barely even bothering to celebrate his legs, no longer fist-pumping his own 180s, stepping forward to retrieve his darts as if it were simply an administrative obligation, like the collecting the little receipt at the end of a credit card transaction.

For those of you who weren’t following this sport back then, a few years back this guy was basically unbeatable. He scored heaviest, finished the deadliest, celebrated the loudest. In 2016-17 he won nine of the 10 major titles and reached the final in the other. And the hubris is still there. But for all his fine displays at this tournament, the performance is not.

We got a taste of this less than a minute into the match, when Van Gerwen flamboyantly threw a 180 to leave himself 25. It was a calculated trade-off, rejecting the percentage setup (treble-19 to leave double-14) in favour of the dopamine hit of the maximum. But if you are going to preen, best not to bust your 25 next visit. And then miss two more for the leg. Littler broke, served out the set and despite starting pretty poorly by his standards, he was away.

Overcoming greatness is hard enough in its own right: it’s harder when you give greatness a four-set head start. But this was exactly what Van Gerwen did, as Littler warmed to his task. Littler took set two in 39 darts and his head bobbed up and down in time as he strode off the stage, as if this were the intro to a song he knew well.

By the fourth set, Littler had lodged himself firmly and rent-free in between the Dutchman’s ears. Van Gerwen was going for the sort of weird numbers – treble-20 on 74, that sort of thing – that betrayed an utter befuddlement, an attempt to shift the vibes out of a sheer inability to shift anything else.

Meanwhile, Littler was doing the same thing for entirely different reasons. He went for bull on 70 to leave himself double-10. He left himself a double seven and hit it, just because. Left himself three darts at 32, he bust his score again. Littler was still averaging under 100. He had hit fewer 180s. He was also 4-0 up.

There were some glimpses of defiance: a 132 finish by Van Gerwen to pinch the fifth set, snuffed out immediately in the following set by Littler, who began all three of his winning legs with 180s. Van Gerwen closed the gap to 5-2 with a 13-darter, and then 6-3 with an average of 106 to put a gloss on the scoreline. Like a man who has lost everything in a storm, reassuringly tapping the change in his pocket.

But the end was soon in coming. And so were the tears: for all his laser-guided brilliance at the board, this is still a kid, with kid feelings, for whom this is his entire world. The Palace rose to him. They will be rising for many years yet.