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It’s barely a couple of years since a 16-year-old Luke Littler and a 21-year-old Gian van Veen came through a 96-player field at Milton Keynes to qualify for the final of the world youth championship. There’s a charming photo of the pair of them with their arms around each other, silly little smiles plastered on to their silly little faces, the cutest high-street haircuts you’ve ever seen. Two kids at the very start of an unforgettable journey.
Did either of them foresee, in those sepia-tinted days of August 2023, that the journey would convey them this far, this fast? I reckon Littler did. There’s never been much room for doubt and scepticism in there. His whole world has been stepping up, throwing a dart and watching it go exactly where he wants it to. Four months later, he would go to Alexandra Palace and change the sport for ever.
Van Veen? I’m not so sure. Even when asked last week whether he thought he was ready to play a world championship final, we got an equivocal kind of answer. There is a reason and realism to him. His whole world has been doubt, misgiving, setback, recalibration, renewal. Belief is evidence of things not seen, and if Van Veen never dreamed of getting this far, perhaps it was because he has learned never to take an achievement for granted until he can physically hold it in his hands.
And so, choose your fighter. The swaggering, vaping, 18-year-old god of darts with the crown on his head and the world at his feet. Or the shy, softly-spoken 23-year-old with the degree in aviation engineering and an inferiority complex that has taken him years to shake off. The born natural with the smooth, flowing action. Or the obsessive dartitis survivor with a throwing hand that looks like a crippled spider. Faith or science; self-confidence or self-knowledge. Littler or Van Veen.
They came through their semi-finals in vastly different fashions. Littler left the stage with barely a bead of sweat on his head after a 6-1 semi-final victory against Ryan Searle, looking vaguely annoyed that he had failed to hit a nine-dart finish. Perhaps 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. He averaged 105.4, won 20 legs out of 28, averaged more than 100 in every set.
Meanwhile Van Veen crumpled with emotion and roared to the heavens after coming through a trial of fire, facing down the Alexandra Palace crowd, the occasion, the weight of history, the pressure, the self-doubt, the great Gary Anderson and the longest game of his life by some distance. It was a performance of unbelievable character in one of the great world championship semi-finals.
Van Veen cruised into a 4-1 lead, converting 12 of his first 15 attempts at double, looking utterly impregnable. Then the 55-year-old Anderson bit back. With the crowd at his heel, he piled in 140s and 180s, threw the house at the young Dutchman, tried everything in his power to rattle him, only for Van Veen to roar back with 180 and 140 against the darts in the deciding leg of the ninth set. Anderson averaged 103, hit 14 maximums, went 46% on his doubles, and lost 6-3.
The fifth set of this match has a fair claim to be one of the greatest seen under this roof. Anderson began it with a 10-darter. Followed it with a 12-darter sealed with a 170 finish. Van Veen responded with an 11-darter, followed by a 12-darter and a 170 finish of his own. Finally he cleaned up the set in a relatively sedate 15 darts, four of which were at double.
This is van Veen at his best: the darts stacked atop each other, not so much cutting through the air as coming in to land. It’s not a natural or instinctive action: the dart rotating at release, the fingers a little askew, the sort of action perhaps liable to break down under pressure. He’s a supreme doubler, the best on the tour by almost three percentage points, but not the most prolific 180 hitter, and he remains totally untested over a best of 13 format. At times here he seemed to sway a little, occasionally rushing his third dart, the sort of fragility that a player like Littler is supremely equipped to expose.
And perhaps this is why Littler remains a clear favourite for Saturday night’s final: that cleanness of vision, a freshness of mind, the sense of inevitability that follows him all the way to that stage. And there has been a kind of inevitability to Littler 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.
This is his third world championship final at his third attempt. He’s already won six major titles in the last 12 months. If he retired tomorrow his list of palmarès would already stack up against some of the greats. Of course there are no certainties in sport, as there are no certainties in life. We know that concepts like fate and destiny 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.
