Phil turns on the power for sweet 16

A night of high drama at London’s Alexandra Palace, but then we’ve come to expect that from the climax of the PDC World Darts Championship.

In his 19th final, Phil Taylor won his 16th title after a bruising battle with Michael van Gerwan. Two sets to nil and four sets to two ahead in the early running, the Dutchman couldn’t get free from the jaws of the old dog for the hardest of roads and Taylor fought back to win 7-4.

As Sid Waddell once said, “If we’d had Phil Taylor at Hastings against the Normans, they’d have gone home”.

The legendary commentator was about all that was missing from it as Taylor fittingly collected the new Waddell Trophy in front of 3,000 people, yet it all still has its misguided and wayward cynics. They base their jibes on an era when Smith and Jones knocked a sketch out of Dai ‘FatBelly’ Gutbucket and Tommy ‘EvenFatterBelly’ Beltcher making their way towards 501 milligrams of alcohol through a series of single pints and double and treble shots. But if anything, the comedy duo had underestimated the drinking capacity of the top players back then considering the stories and characters of yesteryear.

Honestly, things have changed.

Picking the brilliant brain of Kildare’s Jack McKenna a few years back explained a lot. He recalled seeing the late Jocky Wilson run up a $5,000 alcohol bill in a Toronto hotel during a 10-day stint and the look of disgust when Wilson asked for a Bacardi, and was given a glass of the spirit rather than a pint.

He recalled Limerick man Tommy O’Regan flooring a half-bottle of gin before circumnavigating the board in doubles. He recalled Irish team-mate Charlie Byrne, who used to follow his last dart, tripping over the oche and pulling down a Dundee stage. (It took an hour to put back up and with his first arrow after the restart, the board came down off the wall.) He recalled Northern Ireland’s Fred McMullen, who couldn’t subtract, spending a game asking Cliff Lazerenko what he had to hit to finish and then doing just that. He recalled a Welsh supporter taking off his t-shirt to reveal a dart board tattoo only for Alan Evans to start scoring on his skin. He even recalled a female spectator in New Zealand knocking out a 6’2 bouncer before pulling the door off a squad car upon her removal.

But these days sustenance has been replaced by skill, comedy with composure. The circus is long over. Indeed it says a lot about the place of darts in the modern sporting spectrum that it’s even carved off a decent chunk of Christmas all for itself and, remarkably, it’s become synonymous with the festive season for so many.

So much of that is down to Taylor as he turned a joke into a drama with both his talent and his business brain, and turned a pub game into entertainment even Sky Sports cannot get enough of. It’ll stay that way if van Gerwan is anything to go by, even in defeat. In the semi-final he very nearly became the first player to hit two successive nine darters, but ended up with only 17 perfect arrows on the trot. Despite the competition, even Taylor will be glad the sport he helped save is in the safest of hands going forward. But the final is about much more than just a few throws, it’s a marathon not a sprint and the Dutchman will have realised that after this.

The night of high drama at London’s Alexandra Palace we’ve come to expect. The champion we’ve come to expect as well.