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[title]‘I just saw Percy Pig having a ciggy by Wood Green tube,’ says the group chat message.
And so begins darts season in London; three weeks of inane fancy dress, heroic day drinking and the smallest game on the biggest stage. From mid-December until just after New Year, the PDC World Darts Championship takes place at Alexandra Palace, and for these three weeks I become a woman obsessed with this most magnificent of bar sports. And I’m not the only one – for the past few years, tickets have sold out within hours. If you thought getting into the Oasis reunion was hard, you’ve never tried buying seats for the darts.
Despite a growing interest in darts over the past decade, the current championship has been the most over-subscribed to date. It’s thanks in part to the popularity of Luke Littler, the Warrington teenager who came within an inch of winning last year, alas losing out in a final watched on television by a whopping 4.8 million people in the UK. But if Luke hadn’t brought the game back into the zeitgeist, it would have been someone else; the championship had been running for a week before Luke’s first game, and each session was as crazed and chaotic as it was with him there. The darts didn’t need Luke Littler to become the nation’s favourite indoor sport, but it helped.
As Littler showed us, darts is a game where heroes can be made in the course of an afternoon (keep your eyes on 26-year old Dutch player Kevin Doets, who knocked out former champion Michael Smith in the first round). Tickets for the World Darts Championship go on sale in the summer, long before the fixtures are drawn, so you have no idea which of the 96 players taking part you’ll be seeing. You can have favourites, sure; big names such as Michael Van Gerwen, Peter Wright and Gary Anderson inspire messianic revelry among the crowd and plucky young players can instantly become crowd favourites, but the randomness of the ticket draw means you’re never there to support any player in particular.
What you’re there to support is darts. This makes for an extremely good-natured energy. There are no menacing firms nor darts hooligans – instead, people are just here to have fun, and watch some high-end gameplay in the process. All aggro is absent. Well, all apart from the tradition of enthusiastically booing former rugby player and 2021 champion Gerwyn Price, but he loves it.
Price, who recently opened a chip shop in his home town of Markham, south Wales and has a six-pack painted onto the outside of his darts shirt, is perhaps one of the more razzle-dazzle competitors, but for the most part, darts players are thrillingly normal. In the early stages of this year’s tournament we see an Ipswich window cleaner taking on a caravan salesman from the Netherlands.
Though there is a separate women’s title, female players can also compete in the World Darts Championship, with appearances this year from Milton Keynes’ Fallon Sherrock and the championship’s first ever trans player, Noa-Lynn van Leuven. Everyone takes part in a boxing match-style walk-on too, with players striding towards the oche in a blaze of lights and a soundtrack that veers from the sublime (Kiss’s Crazy, Crazy Nights, Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town, The Cranberries’ Zombie) to the ridiculous (Pitbull’s Don’t Stop The Party, toddler anthem Baby Shark).
But it’s the ultra-convivial, ultra-up for it crowd that makes the darts so special. Fancy dress isn’t just encouraged, it’s practically mandatory. On any given session you might spot a gang of traffic cones heckling a Pink Panther struggling to carry four jugs of Neck Oil. Or maybe eight Friesian cows, their udders fit to burst, sitting politely behind a squadron of Where’s Wally’s.
At one point, I spot a bottle of HP sauce, separated from the rest of his fry-up, roaming the venue and searching for his accompanying bacon, egg and sausage. You will also see Minions, Ali Gs, nuns, 118-118 guys and marauding gangs of butchers – nothing is particularly timely, nothing is terribly darts-y. The overriding energy when it comes to costumes just seems to be: make sure you match your mates.
Drinking too, is key. Ally Pally’s biggest room – where the 11,000 capacity gigs take place – is not where the darts happens. For the duration of the darts, that room is the bar. The darts takes place in the smaller West Hall, which holds just 3,200 fans per session.
But despite the Butlin’s bacchanalia of it all, a day at the darts really is, honestly, all about the sport. When a game becomes truly tense, the football chants fade away and everyone is utterly rapt. The fans will ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at every booming wallop that comes from the sound of the dart hitting the mic-ed up board. It is utterly thrilling to watch these battles of nerve, skill, dexterity and determination. And doing it while dressed as Super Mario? Somehow that makes it even more special.
The PDC World Darts Championship is on until Friday, January 3, 2025.