The warm, ashy afterglow of a world championship final is the perfect time to reflect and celebrate, but a terrible time to make predictions. It’s a long old season, most of the big prizes are backloaded towards the end, and a lot can happen in those early placeholder months, some of it relevant and some of it not.
Meanwhile, the recency bias is still strong in this one. What happens in the Palace very often stays in the Palace. This time last year a lot of people were talking about how Michael Smith had finally cracked the code and after winning his first world title could go on to dominate the sport for years to come. Often this new era was depicted as a duopoly with beaten finalist Michael van Gerwen, who would surely return hungrier than ever. This time last year the rise of Gabriel Clemens, Germany’s first world semi-finalist, felt inexorable. This time last year there was a lot of buzz about how 2023 would be the year of Josh Rock.
None of which, ultimately, came to pass. Smith won a Euro Tour event and had a few decent nights in the Premier League, but basically looked like an emaciated shadow of the player who took big-time darts to a new level entirely during that unforgettable final. Van Gerwen won the Premier League and World Series of Darts Finals, was declared “back” on about half a dozen separate occasions, but in between has scarcely looked more fallible or vulnerable. Clemens played exactly like the fringe top-20 player he was, and instead it was Ricardo Pietreczko and Martin Schindler who established themselves as the gathering force in the sport’s biggest emerging market. Rock, for all his occasional flashes of genuine class, still stubbornly refuses to happen.
All of which raises an important consideration, perhaps even a veiled warning, for the victorious Luke Humphries as he enters the most vivid and disorienting year of his life. It is a well-worn cliche for first-time world champions to describe winning their maiden title as having “done the hard part”. But if recent history is any guide, they probably haven’t. Humphries may feel he has climbed his Everest in defeating the darting freak Luke Littler on Wednesday night. What awaits him now, however, is a different order of challenge entirely.
It’s not just the additional demands on your time, whether the far-flung World Series events or the Premier League or the myriad promotional and ambassadorial engagements, the photoshoots and video content, the basic necessity of living in your darts shirt for an entire year.
It’s not just the veneer of bestowed prestige that gives opponents a little extra motivation against you. To an extent it’s also the expectation you put on yourself; the responsibility to play “like a world champion”, rather than like the guy who became world champion.
All of which may help to explain why none of the eight champions who preceded Humphries were able to retain the trophy. It’s four years since a defending champion even managed to go past the quarter-finals. The great Van Gerwen has never won two in a row. Smith struggled badly with the burden last year and may well be a rejuvenated player with the target off his back. The rolling two-year ranking system allows players to dine out on past glories long after the form that generated them has evaporated into memory. So how does Humphries avoid the curse of the champion? Perhaps by doing the very opposite: wiping the slate clean and starting again from zero.
His beaten opponent, meanwhile, is perhaps the most thrilling unknown to emerge from these or any world championships. Littler may not know much about life but he already knows pretty much everything there is to know about darts. He’s been hooking this sport into his bloodstream from before he could walk.
He knows its history and its pitfalls. He knows this is a game best kept simple. And there was an exceptional maturity at work when he acknowledged that it could be another decade before he ever reached another final. Ironically, Littler’s awareness of his own transience could be his best defence against it.
Of course the Premier League is a calculated risk, giving his new rivals a chance to probe his weaknesses, whittling away his opportunities to accumulate the Pro Tour points he will need to move up from his current ranking of No 31 and qualify for the major tournaments in the second half of the year.
But let’s be real: he’s good enough to make a success of pretty much whatever path he chooses. The really interesting question is how he deals with that first slump, that inevitable first drubbing in a sport where the top players are constantly playing each other under varying degrees of scrutiny.
Beyond the two Lukes, the most intriguing stories lurk on the fringes of the elite. Is Peter Wright in a temporary slough or on a terminal slide? Can Jonny Clayton recover his best self? What would it take to get Dimitri Van den Bergh back on track? Can Ross Smith, Ryan Searle or Stephen Bunting make the big leap? Will this finally, finally, be the year of Dave Chisnall?
Nobody knows, of course. This is a sport that remains stubbornly defiant to analysis or deconstruction, a sport of pure vibes, which in a way is the very basis of its appeal.
Wednesday’s final attracted a television audience of almost five million in the UK and almost three million in Germany, and already feels like a new watershed moment for a sport that will continue to grow, continue to cut through, continue to reach areas of the culture that would never have given darts a second Luke. Yes, it’s a bad time to make predictions. But this one at least feels safe.
