“He might be slow, but he is dangerous – like a slothful machine gun,” said Sky’s Wayne Mardle of darts’ version of Patrick Cantlay, Mensur ‘The Gentle’ Suljović. Let’s just say, he chucks his arrows at such a gentle pace, he left his opponent Joe ‘The Rock Star’ Cullen feeling close enough to demented. “He broke his brain,” as Dan Dawson put it.
So, after a highly eventful – and, at times, rather controversial – 10 days at the Ally Pally, Sunday’s opening session at the World Darts Championship proved to be a bit of a let-down, not helped by Mensur insisting on being unhurried.
The referee even had to admonish him for the length of his mid-match celebrations, the fella resembling Marco Tardelli in 1982 every time he hit a double. “If that’s darts, I don’t want no part of it,” said Joe after.
It completed a miserable enough experience for Joe at the venue, having been fined for being a bit too enthused about his earlier triumph over Bradley ‘Bam Bam’ Brooks when he spoke live to Sky’s Abigail Davies: “That was ****ing cracking.”
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But it didn’t get any more entertaining in the next match on Sunday, which proved to be a non-contest, Luke ‘Woody’ Woodhouse annihilating Max ‘Maximiser’ Hopp. But Dan hadn’t sounded like he had much hope for Max before the tie, to be honest, when he outlined how the German had prepared.
“The man has been out in the mountains, he’s been hiking, he’s been having ice baths and he’s been ... READING BOOKS! This is not the sort of stuff we associate with darts players,” he said, intimating that the legend that was Jockey Wilson would be rolling in his grave.
Before Sunday afternoon, there had been no end of excitement: eg a failed drugs test, a wasp invasion, cursing and excessive sauciness. Mind you, we had another flavour of the latter when a camera picked out a lady in the crowd holding a sign that read ‘LOOK AT MY PUDDINGS’, with an arrow pointing towards her boobs. You’d never get that at Wimbledon.
Perhaps the most awkward of the sauciness for Sky came on Friday when Tim ‘Thunder from Down Under’ Pusey made his world championship debut against our own Keane ‘Dynamite’ Barry, the chanting crowd showing no respect at all for the authorities’ decision to ban Tim from nicknaming himself ‘Pusey Magnet’ for the tournament. A similar harsh ruling was made two years ago when Owen Bates was prevented from calling himself ‘The Master’.
And there was that failed drug test by a poor lad who is going through the mill on the personal front, and then to add to his woes he lost his £25,000 prize money. One former darts pro wondered out loud on his podcast if the player in question had been at an “altitude training camp”, at which point Jockey Wilson might have emerged from his grave to ask “WTF?”
It hasn’t always been family-friendly viewing, then, and if you suffer from spheksophobia, it’s been a nightmare. Fear of wasps, like. Ally Pally has become home to at least one of them, Kenyan David ‘Who Not?’ Munyua having one of the blighters land on his face before removing it and placing it in his pocket. And with that Troy Parrott was demoted to second place on the ‘Most Composed in a Critical 2025 Sporting Moment’ list.
Credit to them, talkSPORT tracked down a wasp expert to ask why the pests are turning up in Ally Pally. Apparently, queen wasps usually hibernate during the winter, but the “very loud, bright lights” venue is waking them up because they think it’s spring. So, they’re looking for love.
They found none from Dutch man Jurjen ‘The Dairy Farmer’ van der Velde, who took to the stage armed with a can of Raid for his first round match. It would, then, have given the waspy visitors a right buzz to see him knocked out in the first round by Danny ‘The Freeze’ Noppert.
And, really, that was only half of the quirky stuff that’s gone on in a sporting event that is, well, unrivalled for quirky stuff. All of which led you to nod when you saw that sign in the crowd on Sunday: “Imagine not being here.” It was just in front of the one pointing towards a gentleman’s genitalia. The Sky folk probably needed an ice bath at that point.
