As you nibble on your 465th seasonal After Eight while draped across the armchair, too afraid to stir lest a limb fall off, you do feel a tad guilty for hollering, "TRACK BACK, YOU SHIFTLESS BUGGER!" at your telly.
True, most of these festively active sporting people earn a great deal of loot so might not deserve our sympathy, but it’s in the immediate aftermath of Christmas/New Year’s that you can’t but conclude they half deserve it.
Darts, of course, isn’t quite as physically demanding as some other pursuits, but you still have to stand up straight, and if the arrow-chuckers indulged at all in merrymaking, that could be a challenge.
When Phil Taylor, the Man United of Darts (not quite "The Power" of yesteryear), was beaten in the third round of Sky's PDC World Championships at the Ally Pally, he graciously wished his conqueror Jelle Klaasen well in the semi-final, telling his interviewer that he assumed Jelle wouldn't be carousing on the eve of the new year.
Semi-final: Gary Anderson 6, Jelle Klaasen 0.
You had to wonder if Phil knew something: one bar of Auld Lang Syne and was Jelle an animalistic party machine? Whatever, it was a cataclysmic end to the championships for Jelle and the Dutch fitted kitchen company that sponsors him.
And darts, as we know, is huge in the Netherlands, so it’s possible that Louis van Gaal tuned in at some point just to take his mind off footballing matters, possibly just in time to see that person in the audience holding up a sign that read: “LVG FRAUD!”
No getting away from it for poor Louis, then, although his mood can’t have been as low as James “The Machine” Wade’s after his 5-1 defeat by defending champion Anderson. Hammered. (Beaten comprehensively that is, not trolleyed).
‘Absolutely rubbish’
“I played like a doughnut,” said a crestfallen James, who had entered the arena to the strains of
The Boys Are Back in Town
, escorted by two beefy bouncers and two booby babes, his arrival making Conor McGregor’s entrances seem humdrum. But then Gary was like a
Killer on the Loose
, so to speak, exterminating James’s hopes in a decidedly one-sided affair.
“Absolutely rubbish. It was an embarrassment to be up there. It was diabolical. I humiliated myself. I’m raging, I’m so angry. It hurts from the soul to the heart. Most of all I have disappointed my wife and that’s not what I came here to do,” Wade said.
He didn’t take the defeat well, then, although you’d hope his wife would have been forgiving, or else he’ll go the way of Phil.
“I’m not mentally right for it at the minute,” he had told Sky after his exit. “I’m getting divorced in February, so next year I can push on.”
Oddly enough, over at the Lakeside, marriage had also jeopardised Jim Williams’s hopes in the BDO World Darts Championships, the Welshman revealing that he’d only got back from his honeymoon just before Christmas and “I’d been playing rubbish when I returned”. He abandoned his bride, though, and practised like a demon before taking on Stockport “Silverback” Tony O’Shea. “I lack killer instinct,” said Tony, which isn’t something you hear many silverbacks admit.
Saturday afternoon’s highlight was the clash of Dogsthorpe’s Dennis “The Master” Harbour (harbour master: genius) and Darryl “The Dazzler” Fitton, the match turning in to a thriller, going all the way to a sudden death finish, which had the BBC commentator nearly falling out of his box with excitement: “It’s only the 14th time ever!” That’s not really unprecedented, though, is it?
Consolation prize
Any way, the “Harbour Master” prevailed, which was a bit of a shock because he hadn’t even docked in the Lakeside since 2006, his sole career highlight a winning appearance on
Bullseye
– and even that was ruined by being awarded a car as a prize, rather than a speedboat.
Defeat, then, for The Dazzler, although the former undertaker should at least get a consolation prize for having the most appropriate walk-on tune: One Step Beyond.
