Perhaps the curse of being Luke Littler is that after a while, performances like this begin to feel a little … mundane. What’s that? You’ve mastered the sport of darts at the age of 18, you pull 105 averages out of your back pocket and you’ve reached your third world championship final at your third attempt? Cool, yeah, if you could just put that in an email, cheers.
In the end, it wasn’t remotely close. We all know already that Littler grows in stature as this tournament progresses, that he takes strength with every round, every beaten opponent, every increase in sets. A gathering purple storm is tearing through north London, and here it was Ryan Searle’s severe misfortune to find himself in its path.
There was barely a bead of sweat on the kid as he left the stage after this 6-1 semi-final victory, the presumptive favourite to add a second world title to the World Matchplay, World Grand Prix, UK Open, Grand Slam and Players Championship Finals he has already collected in the past 12 months. By the end, he was no longer really playing Searle in a meaningful sense, but chasing a nine-dart finish that would have made this night truly memorable.
In a way, this is the only real way of arranging a fair contest these days: Littler v History, Littler v The Nine, Littler v his own astonishing numerical standards. Here he averaged 105.4, won 20 legs out of 28, averaged over 100 in every single set, and still looked vaguely annoyed that the nine-darter continued to elude him. Twice he went six perfect, once he went seven perfect, and he only really cheered up afterwards when the TV interviewer suggested that he might be saving up the feat for Saturday’s final.
It is one of the curiosities of this competition that so many of the recent semi-finals have been blowout victories. The last seven have all ended either 6-2, 6-1 or 6-0, a run going back to 2023. And for all the promise Searle has shown in this tournament, progressing to the quarter-finals without even dropping a set, fairly soon it became clear that he too would be feeling the benefits of an early Friday night.
All the same: this has been a breakthrough tournament for him, a tournament in which he has shown us new levels not just to his game, but to himself. He has spoken openly and movingly about his struggles with Autosomal Dominant Optic Atrophy, an incurable genetic eye condition that affects his vision and often forces him to ask the referee what he’s just hit.
And as he left the stage with the crowd singing his name, the new world No 8 could reflect on the knowledge that he finally belongs at the very top tier of this sport.
But this was perhaps a trial too far for a player largely unaccustomed to the latter stages of big majors, with their heavy rhythm, the long hours of waking and waiting and thinking.
Most tournaments, even a lot of the big ones, take place over just three or four days. The quarters, semis and final are often all held in the same evening. Here, by contrast, the time hangs and drags. Time to reflect, time to doubt. None of which makes failure or underperformance inevitable. But for those new to this, it takes a little getting used to.
Perhaps Searle needed to play the best game of his life to beat Littler here; he didn’t even play the best game of his year. He averaged 93, missed far too many big numbers, his darts for whatever reason not quite sitting right in the board, forcing him to go downstairs more often than he would like. Quickly the body language turned negative, and for a player as adept as Littler at sensing the shifts of energy and morale in a game, Searle may as well have held up a sign saying “EAT ME”.
The real shame was that the early stages of this game portended a genuine contest. Searle was maybe a little lucky to claim the first set after Littler missed twice at double 10, but towards the end of the third set the match was still on throw. Instead a horrible leg on his own darts allowed Littler to break for 2-1, start set four with a 180, hold the pose for effect, and that in retrospect was when the back of the match was broken.
A run of eight legs in a row coincided with Searle going cold on the doubles. There were occasional flashes of defiance: a 170 finish after Littler had gone seven perfect darts into the nine was met with the biggest cheer of the match.
But of course it merely forestalled the inevitable. And there is a kind of inevitability to Littler here, as there has been all year, as there has been – in a way – ever since he walked cockily on to this stage, to a song nobody over the age of 30 had heard before, and began destroying virtually everybody he met.
He’ll face Gian van Veen or Gary Anderson in the final, either of whom can give him a decent game. And of course there are no certainties in sport, as there are no certainties in life. We know that concepts like fate and destiny and aura are essentially a construct, a pleasant fiction we weave for ourselves. We know this. The problem is that nobody seems to have told Littler yet.
