The first days of January are among the dreariest of the year. The festive spirit dissipated quickly this month, unless you attended Alexandra Palace in London for the Paddy Power World Darts Championships.
The tournament at the venue better known as Ally Pally is where darts enters the public consciousness every year and the good-humoured mood and raucous singalongs never disappoint.
This year the game of darts has gained a profile not seen since the halcyon days of the 1980s when it was on terrestrial television and players such as Eric Bristow and Jocky Wilson were household names.
[ The meteoric rise and sad fall of lovable darts legend Jocky WilsonOpens in new window ]
Luke Littler’s run to the world final at just 16 is a story that transcended not only darts but sport itself. He became the youngest player to make the final of the World Darts Championships.
Just 14 months ago he announced his entry as a new talent by winning the Irish Open in Killarney. His opponent then was Dublin teenager Sean McKeon who, in light of Littler’s success at Ally Pally, would have loved the bragging rights of having dethroned the world finalist in Co Kerry.
McKeon has genuine prospects of turning professional and is scoring 80 to 90 points per visit to the oche, as the throw line is known in darts. He is studying for his Leaving Cert this year but still manages to find time to practise several hours a day.
“I’m not stressing about it. There is always the darts. I’m not a big fan of school,” said McKeon on Sunday at the Riverside Hotel in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, where he was competing at the Leinster Championships.
His friend Adam Dee (18) from Carlow has beaten Littler not once but four times at junior level.
“At my peak, I can compete with anybody,” he says confidently. He finished runner-up in the World Darts Federation Boys final in December, losing out to Bradley van der Velden of the Netherlands.
Dee, known by his stage name Dee One and Only, after his walk-on music The One and Only by pop singer Chesney Hawkes, is another with aspirations to turn professional.
Much of the differences between dart players is in the head, he contends, and he admires Littler’s mental resolve in dealing with the pressure and getting to the final in London earlier this month.
Another potential professional is Jamie French, also from Carlow, who is only 12 and got three 180s, a 146 and 123 checkout while competing in the men’s section on Saturday night. He has represented Ireland at international level. He met Littler in Gibraltar. Littler is like a veteran by comparison.
In Wexford at the weekend, all 12 counties were represented with competitors wearing their county colours.
More than 300 men and women competed in the adult competitions and 80 in the youth competition on 20 dart boards. That’s just the provincial championship. The Inter-Counties Championship, which will be held in Navan next month, will be an even bigger affair. Twenty-six counties will be represented at that tournament, as Northern Ireland has its own darts organisation.
For most of these players representing their county in darts is the height of their ambitions, but others want to take it further.
The absence of mainstream media coverage was a common complaint in Enniscorthy. Robyn Byrne and Katie Sheldon were on the Irish team that won the World Cup of Darts in Denmark in August. They broke the historic duopoly enjoyed by England and the Netherlands in the tournament.
“We have done more interviews for Luke Littler than we did when we won the World Cup,” says Byrne. “We were in the newspaper and on the radio, but it wasn’t due to our achievements.”
Darts and pubs have typically gone together – and while Ireland has a world-class pub culture, the country has never produced a world darts champion. Fermanagh’s Brendan Dolan reached the quarter-finals of the World Darts Championships this year (where he was eliminated by Littler), but no Irish player has reached the final or won the tournament. Why?
“It’s all down to money,” says Dublin darts county manager Geoff Kinsella.
There is plenty of talent in the country and no lack of interest, he says. Some 600 competitors play in Dublin leagues and 100 men, women and youths turned up for the Dublin trials to represent the county at provisional and national level.
Making the step up to professional darts requires money without any guarantee of a return. A would-be Irish professional would get no change from €1,500 to compete in a qualifying tournament in England between flights, accommodation and expenses.
There’s an absence of big sponsorship too. The Danish lager company Tuborg is a sponsor of the Leinster championships, but alcohol sponsorship is problematic, Kinsella says.
In the 1980s Alas Smith & Jones satirised the culture around darts, which then featured obese men on television drinking and smoking themselves through big tournaments.
This is a legacy issue and not relevant today. Professional darts players don’t drink on stage any more and it is not appropriate at youth level, he says.
Sponsors are reluctant to come on board. Players in Ireland play for the love of the game, but it is a long way from that to being a world champion.
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