Who's in charge, me or the Devil? The agony and the ecstasy of elite darts

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At 9am on May 22, preparing for the Premier League Darts tournament's penultimate fixture, Nathan Aspinall placed a call to his hypnotist, Chris O'Connor. This has become his morning ritual when competing. Four months earlier, Aspinall, who is 33 and goes by the nickname "The Asp", had arrived in O'Connor's offices in Prescot, near Liverpool, crying. He was one of the most talented darts players of his generation, and yet the action that had helped him to the top -- the steady hand, the studied intent, the repetitive motions performed a million times -- seemed impossible. "I literally couldn't throw a dart," Aspinall told me.

Aspinall was struggling with what those in the elite darts world call "dartitis". This is pronounced sombrely, with no acknowledgment of a pun. When afflicted, players find that at the crucial moment their fingers should send the small arrow hurtling, the metal shaft seems, briefly, fused to their skin. The condition often worsens rapidly. With each throw, the pressure builds, the worry -- will it happen again? -- fills the mind and the memories of past mistakes, past indignities, cascade.

"It was ruining his life," O'Connor told me. He described himself both as a "solution-focused hypnotist" and a "normal bloke". Outside work, he's a football fan and a boxing timekeeper, something that helps his rapport with sportsmen. O'Connor became interested in therapy work after finding himself on the brink of a breakdown at the end of a 14-year stint in the police. "I was about to get sectioned," he said. He tried various conventional therapies, but nothing worked, until he tried hypnotherapy and felt, finally, less depressed, less angry. No one was more surprised than him. "I thought it was all like Paul McKenna," he said, people barking like dogs at the click of fingers. He decided to train formally. O'Connor has a matter-of-fact way of explaining the web of neuropathways that make up the troublesome human mind: "You can reprogram your brain," he told Aspinall.

O'Connor believes that darts is entirely a psychological game. Dartitis has nothing to do with the physical body, he told me. It's about anxiety, self-loathing, fear. Darts is a cruel sport. Players stand alone, no teammates to share the load, no one to ask for help. Misses are tiny -- millimetres can decide futures, make heroes. And the aim of the game is mind-numbing, repetitive, frustrating. "I spend my whole life throwing three pieces of metal at the same target seven hours a day," Aspinall told me. Aspinall isn't a darts fan. "I don't watch it. I don't particularly like it." he said. "It's my job. I get bored when I practise." He dreams of retiring at 45, buying a villa abroad and opening a bar.

Recently, the pressure on Aspinall, and other elite darts players, has grown. The sport is experiencing an explosion in popularity not seen since its heyday in the 1980s. This is often credited to the 2023 arrival of a bizarrely gifted teenager, Luke "The Nuke" Littler. In the World Darts Championship at London's Alexandra Palace, he beat two former champions, becoming the youngest ever finalist while still two weeks off his 17th birthday.

Almost five million people tuned in to watch Littler in the tournament final, where he lost 7-4 to Luke Humphries. On Sky, these are viewer numbers enjoyed by no other sport except football. Darts tournaments are now consistently outperforming golf, rugby league and tennis for viewers. This is particularly true of the Premier League, a competition run by the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), which pits the game's best players against each other.

To win a leg of darts, a player must attempt to reach zero from a starting 501. The most efficient way is by scoring 180s, hitting three darts into the treble 20 -- a small slither of colour under the midnight position on the board. The ultimate is a nine-dart finish, where the 501 is reduced in just three visits. Known as a "perfect leg", this happens rarely. Instead players usually have to work the board, chipping away at the numbers, aiming for different doubles or trebles, recalculating after every miss, then wait, sweating, while their opponent plays.

In these moments, players must try to muster confidence and think positively, but without pausing to think too much. To play well, according to all the players I spoke to, they must be aware and unaware, present and absent. They must enter a flow state -- able to mentally calculate what so many cannot calculate -- the complexities of distance, space, speed, and to strike the same spot, again and again. Phil "The Power" Taylor, for a long time the most recognisable face in darts having achieved a record 16 World Championships in the 1990s and 2000s, wrote in his autobiography, "I am not a clever person, and in fact it may be no big fault in a darts player. How can your mind wander if you haven't got much mind in the first place?" When I asked Littler how it felt when he played, he called it "locking in", just him and the dartboard.

The quest to hold one's nerve can breed unhealthy habits. It's part of the reason why, historically, darts players have often drunk to excess, chain smoked, or created ultra-egos full of bravado. They come to believe these habits will ward off the threat of failure, or that they can't play without such crutches, that maybe without the beer or the peacocking, they'll be on stage, the crowd hollering and just crumble.

This happened to Aspinall. In Spring 2023, he was playing Peter "Snakebite" Wright, a Scottish player in his fifties, known for his neon mohawk hairstyles and psychedelic patterned trousers. His walk-on music is Pitbull's "Don't Stop the Party". Compared with Aspinall, with his neat dark hair and understated kit -- black and red shirt, black trousers -- Wright seems to embody a gaudy era of darts that is largely dying out. Aspinall was 4-0 up. Then suddenly, he couldn't let go.

Littler regarded the board with flared nostrils and the haughty expression of a despot monarch being offered a new bride. When he missed, which was rarely, he looked confused rather than disappointed

Watching a video of Aspinall in that moment, one appreciates how maddingly easy this task looks when a player is throwing well. The darts sail seamlessly, seemingly destined for the right spot. Once dartitis hits, this is replaced by the faintest glimpse of what most of us would look like up there, struggling to even make contact with the board, firing darts off at random. "It was basically a panic attack," Aspinall told me. With every throw, he felt fear, the same incapacitation. "Potentially in a game of darts, because of all the throws, I could be having 20 panic attacks, then all of a sudden you don't want to play, because you don't want to do that any more. You can't, you don't want to embarrass yourself." On stage with Wright, Aspinall looked haunted. "Bemused," as the commentator put it. He lost 6-5. After the match, he went to a bathroom backstage, locked the door and tore it apart, punching walls, smashing hand-dryers, shouting at himself in the mirror. "I thought my career was over," he said.

In the months prior to the 2025 Premier League competition, Aspinall and O'Connor had begun a programme of trying to rewire the player's mind. They talked about his diet, about the importance of sleep. Aspinall talked about wanting to be a nicer person around his wife and kids. "If I had a bad day of darts, I was normally vile the day after," Aspinall told me, "I wanted to be able to move on."

O'Connor explained to Aspinall that the brain was like a bucket. The fuller it got with negative thoughts, with the shadows of the past, the more likely it was to weigh you down or spill over. When the bucket was full or leaking, a darts player started operating in the primitive part of the brain, thrashing around in fight-or-flight mode, associating darts with survival. Instead players need to strive for an empty bucket, for the clarity and space to work strategically and calmly. O'Connor used trances to help Aspinall rest. He got him to repeat positive affirmations, visualise lifting a trophy, throwing a dart perfectly, like he just couldn't miss. O'Connor made a recording of his voice, soundtracked to calming music, for Aspinall to listen to before bed. "It's time to relax," O'Connor says in the track. "No one wants or expects anything from you."

In the Premier League, eight of the best players in the world battle it out. Four have qualified automatically, for topping the PDC Order of Merit, which is calculated based on who has won the most prize money in ranking tournaments over a two-year period (Humphries qualified top, with £1.9mn and Littler second, with £1.3mn). Then there are four wild cards, selected by the PDC. Aspinall was one.

The tournament runs for 17 weeks, every Thursday from February to May, culminating in a playoff final at the O2 in London, contested by the four players who have performed the best in the preceding weeks. Many players told me the Premier League is the most gruelling event they play, due to both its cyclical and gladiatorial nature. The participants travel, like some strange boy band, from city to city -- Dublin, Nottingham, Cardiff, Berlin, Leeds -- mopping up fans and points. Every night, they must give it their all.

Month on month, darts viewing figures are rising, especially among under 35s and women (on Sky, the share of female viewers increased from 28 per cent to 35 per cent during last year's Premier League). This is a remarkable recovery from the 1990s, when, as the former player and current Sky pundit Wayne Mardle told me, audience numbers "just fell off a cliff". This was partly due to the chaotic management of the sport, which, in 1993, resulted in an acrimonious spat between the then governing body and the players, many of whom were unable to make a living from darts, a fallout still referred to as "The Split".

The former world number one, John Lowe, one of the sport's dominant players in the 1980s, told me that, despite being a beneficiary of the moment when darts was first broadcast on TV, the only way he could make a stable living was by pooling winnings with others. He and his main competitor, Eric "the Crafty Cockney" Bristow performed rivalry but behind the scenes kept each other afloat. "There was a living, but not a lucrative living like there is today," said Lowe, who is nicknamed "Old Stoneface" due to his composure. In many leagues, where players represented their pubs, the prizes were little more than "a Japanese alarm clock", he said. "Now, if the winner's on £200,000, the runner-up is on £100,000, so he's actually already won."

Even at its height, darts struggled to be taken seriously. (To this day, it is not in the Olympics, and was only recognised as a sport by Sport England in 2005). A 1980 skit on the popular comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News showed darts players competing not to score doubles, but to down them. "It's a good start, double vodka, single pint, another double vodka," said a Geordie commentator, voiced by Rowan Atkinson. In a 1988 piece for The Observer, "Gutted for Keith" (about the darts player Keith Deller), the novelist Martin Amis referred to darts players as being "outfitted by Rent-a-Tent and tip[ping] the scales at a couple of hundredweight each". Amis's 1989 novel London Fields, painted a darts player, the unsubtly named Keith Talent, as a sex pest and petty criminal, the most likely culprit in a murder.

To play well, players must enter a flow state, to calculate what so many cannot -- the complexities of distance, space, speed -- and to strike the same spot, again and again

Stereotypes are vexing because they are often, in part, true. The Welsh player Alan Evans, one of the first recognisable faces of television darts, died from alcohol-related illness at 49. Jocky Wilson, a hugely popular Scot who fought it out with Lowe and Bristow in the 1980s, was a recluse by 50, bankrupt, diabetic and living on disability allowance in a tiny flat on the estate where he grew up. "Jocky could only do his thing with at least three pints warm up, three pints during the game and the odd nip of vodka," longtime darts commentator Sid Waddell wrote in his darts history, Bellies and Bullseyes. In 2011, Phil Taylor, a beloved mentor among many of today's players, received a conviction for indecent assault after a drinking game with two female fans after a tournament.

"Who's in charge, me or the Devil?," asked Ted "The Count" Hankey in a widely shared old clip that showed him torn between aiming for a double 12 or a double eight. It's a study of the torment the game is capable of inducing, the wrestle with the board's beckoning sphere of numbers, the struggle for dominance and certainty.

Darts' current success came slowly and then suddenly, catalysed first not by Littler, but the female player Fallon Sherrock. In 2019, the then-25-year-old, who had turned to darts after abandoning a career in hairdressing, became the first woman to beat a man in competition. She defeated Ted Evetts, and then the world number 11 Mensur Suljović at the World Championship. Suddenly, everyone was talking about darts as a place of progress. Sherrock's victories were seen as all the sweeter precisely because of darts' previous associations with problematic masculinity. Billie Jean King tweeted her congratulations.

Then, along came Littler, a player whose youth is unbelievable both because of his talent and the fact that he looks about 20 years older than he is. Littler appeared on talk shows, hung out with celebrities, amassed more than a million Instagram followers. "He can't walk down the street without being stopped," his manager Martin Foulds -- who also manages Aspinall -- told me.

James Tattersall, managing director of Littler's sponsor, equipment specialist Target Darts, told me that turnover more than doubled last year, reaching £65mn. "Luke Littler" was their most popular product category. In 2025, the company expects to grow beyond £100mn. "You see kids asking for dartboards instead of PlayStations, and that never happened 10 years ago," he said. "They want to be like us, like I wanted to be a footballer player," said Aspinall.

As with Sherrock, Littler's novelty had something to do with the norms of darts. Because physical fitness is not a prerequisite, players are typically older than other sports professionals. Many find form in their thirties or keep going well into their fifties. Lowe only picked up a dart for the first time at 21, when someone needed a bathroom break in the pub and asked him to step in. "Now they're playing from six," Lowe said. A 16-year-old triumphing over a 56-year-old, as happened when Littler defeated the celebrated Dutch player Raymond van Barneveld at Alexandra Palace in December 2023, was a captivating upset.

At the same time, Littler seemed to bolster mental clichés of a darts player. Tubby, short, prone to sleeping until the afternoon and celebrating wins with a kebab, he seemed to be a strange envoy, sent to link past and present. During each match, he regarded the board with flared nostrils and the haughty expression of a despot monarch being offered a new bride. When he missed, which was rarely, he looked confused rather than disappointed. His was an astounding display of confidence for any sportsman, but especially for a child, which he was until January of this year, when he turned 18 and could, at last, attend tournaments without being chaperoned by his parents, and sleep alone in his own hotel room when on tour.

Before Sherrock and Littler, the PDC worked hard to rehabilitate the sport. Its president Barry Hearn described "professionalising" players, getting them agents, sponsors, schedules. He taught them how to court fame, giving them alter egos, like Steve "The Muffin Man" Hine, who used to be a baker. This was a technique borrowed from the other sports Hearn promotes, snooker and boxing. Sports are "soap operas", he told me. And the identification with the characters can be particularly strong in darts because of the relatability of the players.

With darts, Hearn realised that walk-on music had a rousing effect on the crowd. Unlike snooker, where play is largely conducted in silence, at the darts, singing and chanting is encouraged, as is fancy-dress. Littler's song is "Greenlight" by Pitbull. Sherrock favours "Last Friday Night" by Katy Perry. Aspinall's choice -- the millennial anthem "Mr Brightside" by The Killers -- is widely seen as the best. The crowds scream it back to him. "It puts a little bit of pressure on the other guy who didn't get quite as big a noise," Hearn said.

When they're throwing, players have their back to the melee. But central to the game is the ritual that players must retrieve their darts from the board. This requires a brief moment when they must turn and face the crowds, the chants, the boos. Alan Warriner-Little, a former player who runs the PDPA, a support association that helps players with everything from logistics through to addictions and crises, described it to me as like "trying to play chess in front of a football-stadium crowd".

Alongside the theatrics, the PDC has also encouraged a better class of play. Drinking alcohol on stage is now banned. Average scores are up. To incentivise competition, Hearn vastly increased prize amounts. "Money is sport," he told me. "All the top players will be millionaires and multimillionaires, and I'm very proud of that." Towards the end of the Premier League, which has a top prize of £275,000, the PDC announced that the winner of the upcoming World Darts Championship would receive a full £1mn. "They always said darts is in the pub. You'll never take darts out of the pub, but they have, they've managed to do that," Lowe told me.

Unlike Littler who, on the encouragement of his father, began playing darts at the age of 18 months on a magnetic board, Aspinall was 16 when he first picked up a dart. He was in the pub with his grandfather, sipping on a pint. But it frustrates him when people call the game "a pub sport". "It's transcended that," he said.

His manager, Foulds, founder of ZXF Sports Management, is now one of darts' most important business figures, thanks to his signing of Littler. Foulds got into the business almost by accident at exactly the right moment. Back in 2017, he was running Prestige Building Supplies, a company supplying plastering and roofing materials in Rochdale. A new hire in the sales team, Paul Aspinall, mentioned his son was an up-and-coming darts player, and asked Foulds if Prestige would sponsor him. A player in the top 16 or 32 can earn hundreds of thousands but for those starting out, it costs to compete: travel, hotels, time off work.

Foulds and I met on the morning of the Sheffield fixture in the lobby of a hotel that smelled of chlorine and fry-ups. This was where the Premier League players were staying, and security staff roamed nearby. Foulds enjoyed watching the darts, and he figured he could do more for Aspinall than just donate: "I said to him, 'Look I can't throw for toffee, but I know business, and everything I've done has turned to gold."

He got Aspinall profitable sponsorship, so he could quit his accountancy job and practise all day. When this didn't work, and he realised Aspinall needed structure, he got him working in the Prestige warehouse for a few hours each morning to "occupy his mind" and then practise in the break room all afternoon. At moments, it looked like the project could fail: Foulds was on holiday in Greece when Aspinall, meant to be playing in Barnsley, called and said he was miserable and skint and didn't want to go. Foulds transferred him £1,000 and told him to calm down. Aspinall went to the tournament and won, securing his first professional title.

Foulds began to pick up other players. He signed Littler after hearing rumours of an amazing kid in Warrington who played bolder and braver than anyone else. He recalled, early on in their relationship, taking Littler on a three-hour drive to visit the sponsor Target Darts in Harlow. "I got about five words out of him," Foulds said. Foulds tried asking him what he liked doing: going out with mates, drinking? "Nothing," Foulds told me. "Just the darts. That's why he's one of the best." Foulds added: "Look at Serena and Venus Williams. They basically had no life when they were young, their dad had them down the court practising and practising. I don't know whether they are happy or not."

From the age of nine, Littler was coached by Karl Holden, who runs St Helens Darts Academy, which sits between Liverpool and Manchester. When Littler first showed up, one of Holden's staff called him over, "I think the kid's a bit too good," she said. Today, Holden sees 80 or 90 children, some as young as eight, each week. He has 200 on his waiting list. There isn't room for any more boards in the practice room, he explained. Another academy had opened down the road to meet demand. In 2021, the Junior Darts Corporation, a sibling organisation to the PDC, recorded 60 registered academies worldwide. As of this year, there were 180. O'Connor told me he had children coming into his offices complaining of dartitis at age 10 or 11.

For a long time, Foulds tried to juggle sports management with running his building supplies company. Now he is down to working just one day a week for Prestige. Last year, the same year Littler became the third most searched person by UK Google users behind Kate Middleton and Donald Trump, profits from his darts business overtook those from Prestige. (And that company is turning over millions, Foulds added.)

Foulds tries to help his players plan for the future. At the start of our meeting, he was wrapping up a phone call making arrangements for Littler to buy a house. Foulds told me if he were Littler, he'd be out of the game in five years or so. Retire, live a quiet life. "There's going to come a point where people are sick of him winning, so they are going to want him to lose," he said. "They cheer you when you reach the top, and then they find it boring, and they want you to fall."

In 2024, Aspinall came off social media, criticising "disgusting" abuse. His inclusion in this year's Premier League, despite his struggles with dartitis, sparked more vitriol. Some claimed Aspinall had only been chosen for his fun walk-on song.

The tournament had become loaded in his mind, a way of answering back. O'Connor urged him to avoid such thinking, to focus on only what he could control. When Aspinall won the 15th night of the tournament in Aberdeen, the possibility of a place in the final beckoned. Playing at London's O2, in front of some 15,000 people had been Aspinall's dream. It all rested on Sheffield and on beating Michael van Gerwen, an ominous-looking Dutchman who plays in lime green and who basically won everything between 2013 and 2023. Through this tournament, van Gerwen had been a shadow of his former self. (Immediately after the end of the competition, he announced he was going through a divorce.)

The participants travel, like some strange boy band, from city to city -- Dublin, Nottingham, Cardiff, Berlin, Leeds -- mopping up fans and points

Come lunchtime backstage at Sheffield's Utilita Arena, all was quiet save for the occasional thud of metal against board. Across two practice rooms backstage, the players began to assemble. The psychological battle often starts here. In the hours ahead of matches, players notice each other's preparation, see who looks tired. Stephen "the Bullet' Bunting arrived first, around 3pm. It was Bunting who recommended that Aspinall, his good friend, seek help from O'Connor. He had gone through his own dark period a few years prior. He'd become depressed, drinking and eating too much, scared to fly, scared of everything in fact. He felt that every time he tried to play darts, people were laughing at him. "I never want to go to that place again," he said. This tournament, he was bottom of the table, but staying positive, working on "keeping his bucket empty", he told me.

As usual, Littler arrived last, and sat fiddling on his phone like any other teenager. He rarely practises backstage, or much at all, in fact. Still, he was top of the leader board -- guaranteed to reach the O2. Also safe in second place was his rival Luke Humphries, known as "Cool Hand Luke". In 2021, Humphries lost more than four stone in a bid to improve his physical and mental health. Still, he swings from stoic to jaded. In April, he spoke of feeling "emotionless" from playing too much. Later, on X, he wrote it would be the last time he'd speak openly: "Everything I say or ever do just never seems to be good enough for anybody. As long as no one complains when we all give the same answers in interviews like robots and not our true feelings then everyone I guess will be happy." In person, Humphries is likeable, but stiff. When I asked how he was feeling during this tournament, he spoke in the banalities of a politician. "I'm sort of through that now," he said.

Out front, spectators dressed as Superman and Buzz Lightyear assembled. Some wore foam dart boards around their heads. Many sported plastic caps over their hair, to give the illusion of baldness. John McDonald, darts announcer for the past 20 years, stood in the wings and marvelled. "I can't begin to tell you that this event once was in front of 300 people in a leisure centre," he said. As play approached, the air filled with a sense of jubilant menace. The floor was already wet with beer.

In a side room, Matt Porter, PDC chief executive, was trying to order a pasta takeaway to see him through the night. Some 30 years younger than Hearn, Porter has been central to the PDC's modernisation, from international pushes to the post-#MeToo axing of the walk-on girls. (Dancers remain.) In countries where there is no history of darts, the PDC tends to transport its own players to drum up excitement. Porter was pleasantly surprised when Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, crown prince and prime minister of Bahrain, got in touch recently, saying he loved darts, and requesting boards be put in more than 80 state-run schools so locals could learn the sport. America has been harder to crack but, at the end of this month, Littler will play Madison Square Garden.

On a table at the front of the Sheffield arena, Aspinall's brother and friends watched him battle it out with van Gerwen. Between each throw, they hollered his name: "Go on Nathan!". Aspinall told me that when he's playing well, the positive chants wash over him like a warm wave. "When I'm playing shit, and they chant me, I hear every single person, know where they are, because I'm not focused," he said. This time the crowd was with him. From the start, van Gerwen missed various easy chances and looked miserable. The match finished 6-2.

Backstage, Aspinall was ecstatic. "I played f**king so well," he said, sounding almost stunned. He'd lost an early leg, but it actually helped, he said, it cleared out his adrenalin, let him build back up. It was the hypnotherapy with O'Connor that taught him to allow for moments like that, he said. "Have you ever seen the film Lucy?" Aspinall asked me, referencing the 2014 sci-fi film starring Scarlett Johansson as a drugs mule, who accidentally ingests a synthetic drug that enables her to time-travel and to see the future. Aspinall related: "I said to Chris I feel like I'm unlocking parts of my brain that I never had before."

The overall winner of the night was Littler. Around 11pm, he slunk into the press conference, vaping, and declared, before the news cameras began rolling, that he felt "like shite". He had a cold, he explained. He answered journalist questions with the reliable robotism of a footballer. Only after the cameras stopped did he relax. Littler has a loud and sincere laugh and, throwing back his head and chortling, he looked, for a brief moment, free.

The play-off final of the Premier League took place at the O2 Arena on May 29. It was sponsored by Cinch, an online used car dealer. Most of the players' shirts carried logos for online betting companies and dart manufacturers. Humphries's shirt read MyJobQuote.com, a website that connects customers to plumbers or handymen. Aspinall has a deal with Deploy, a recruitment agency. Even in her 2019 heyday, when Sherrock's face was all over front pages, she was sponsored not by Clinique (like women's Premier League Rugby) or Tiffany's and British Airways (tennis star Emma Raducanu), but a small metal detector firm based out of a village in Berkshire.

Mardle recalled, while competing in the 2005 Premier League, sending out emails to Nike, Adidas, Rolex, Omega, Breitling, Patek Philippe, asking for sponsors. No one bit. "It was all cabs and Bob's Burgers," he said. But as the players get trimmer, better, the interest will come, he said. Porter was pragmatic: if you're the head of marketing at a big global or luxury corporation, you have to be "quite brave" to stand up in front of your board and pitch darts.

Those coming into the sport now have probably never played with a drink in hand. They arrive at a moment when hundreds of pubs close down each year. For them, throwing a dart may have no overt social associations, but still conjure a feeling of familiarity and connection, by its similarities to gaming, and conditions their generation are used to, solo in their bedrooms, staring at one spot, performing repetitive, addictive movements. It's all in the hand: a thumb twizzle, a flick of a finger. When not playing darts, Littler sometimes streams himself playing Fifa on the gaming platform Twitch. "That's what I've always wanted to do, is be a Twitch streamer," he told journalists, ahead of the Premier League final, when asked what he'd do if he wasn't playing darts. He is the one player with a mega brand sponsor: Microsoft's Xbox division.

It was still sunny outside when the lights were lowered inside the O2. Littler dispatched Welsh player Gerwyn Price 10-7 in the first semi-final. The crowd sang "Walking in a Littler Wonderland." Then it was Aspinall vs Humphries. That morning, Aspinall and O'Connor did their hypnosis as usual. Backstage, Aspinall seemed rested, confident. And for a moment, on stage, it really looked like he could do it. He went two legs down but pulled back, and then overtook. Whenever Humphries caught him or went one up, he fought back. It was 4 all. Then 5 all. Then 6, 7. Only then did his determination seem to slip. Suddenly it was 9-7 to Humphries, and the result seemed fated. Afterwards Aspinall was accepting of the loss. It was the matter of a couple of darts, he said. Just a couple of darts, nothing more than that. He'd done his best.

In the final, Humphries defeated Littler too, coming back from three legs behind to win 11-8. Afterwards, both looked exhausted. Littler said he was glad it was over. The rivalry between the two Lukes is now the sport's main attraction. Backstage, as staff took down the board, cleared the empties, Humphries reflected on where the battle would take them next. "It could be that in five years' time, there's about 10 players as good as me and Luke, and then there's a massive battle between us all."

Listening to him, I thought of something Holden had said about his academy and the quality of 13- and 14-year olds who have joined his top group. All of them play as if they know they will win, know they can kill, with utter faith in each tiny missile. "It's never-ending," he said. "They just keep coming off the conveyor belt, so to speak." A few weeks before, Aspinall had played a seven-year-old, as a favour. "If you're playing a young kid, you have a bit of fun with him, then ultimately, let them win," he told me, laughing. "But I actually tried to beat this seven-year-old. It was amazing."