‘Darts hero queued in rain after Premier League night time – it would not occur now’

In 2008, on a wet night time in Sheffield, a bedraggled John Part waited patiently in line at a taxi rank.

He queued with merry punters, a lot of whom had been in fancy costume, as he tried to get again to his resort. Part, a multi-world champion and one of many largest names in darts had simply performed within the Premier League on the metropolis’s enviornment.

But there was no chauffeur service or minibus to ferry the gamers to the place they wanted to be. It was a case of ‘thanks for the entertainment, but you can make your own way home now’. Such a situation would by no means occur these days. There will at all times be a couple of grumbles about workloads and situations, however darts gamers have by no means had it so good.

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Luke Littler darts followers can again ‘The Nuke’ in Premier League together with his enjoying shirt

Luke Littler followers can now purchase the 17-year-old’s enjoying shirt to help him as he continues to display his expertise within the Premier League.

The darts sensation was solely 16 when he wowed Alexandra Palace on the World Darts Championship (WDC), regardless of a last loss to Luke Humphries.

The Nuke will proceed enjoying in opposition to seven of the perfect dart gamers on this planet — Humphries, Michael van Gerwen, Gerwyn Price, Michael Smith, Nathan Aspinall, Rob Cross and Peter Wright — in a mini-tournament in a special metropolis each Thursday till the ultimate in May.

BUY LUKE LITTLER’S SHIRT HERE

The imaginative and prescient of Part jockeying with the plenty for a taxi has stayed with Sky Sports colleague Wayne Mardle, who had additionally been in motion that night time in South Yorkshire. For him, it’s a signal of how far the game has come within the 16 years since.

“This is the growth of darts in a nutshell,” he informed Daily Star Sport. “John Part is queuing with everybody else to get a taxi out of Sheffield Arena.

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“He had been last on that night. There were no cars laid on and there he is. He’s standing there, in the Canadian shirt he used to wear, in the pouring rain with everybody else.

“You wouldn’t see that now, would you? I was in the car with Peter Manley and our other halves. It was just a case of ‘sort yourself out’. John always used to do his own thing, but still…

“Nowadays, you can’t get near the players. They’re like Premier League footballers. There are cars and mini buses laid on for the players. It shows you how far the game has grown and how professional it has become.”

Mardle, who threw the first-ever dart within the Premier League, competed in 4 campaigns general. In the early days, modest venues with a capability of some hundred had been ample.

Before the World Championship switched to Alexandra Palace from the Circus Tavern, they had been nonetheless considered massive crowds. Therefore, rocking up the Bournemouth International Centre, which has an analogous capability to Ally Pally, and seeing hundreds in attendance blew the gamers away.

“We were told it was a travelling roadshow, that we were going to grow the game of darts,” recalled Mardle of the early Premier League days. “Yes, it was going to be aggressive since you need to win, nevertheless it was about leisure. It wasn’t seen as that critical.

“We were going to places like Colchester, Norwich with 600-700 people. Then one week at Bournemouth, which is 3,200, it was like ‘wow’. It was as if it was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen.

“You have to remember, back then, the most that most of us had played in front of was the Matchplay [at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool] which holds, 1,800, 1,900. Generally, it was 500, 600, 700.

“We weren’t going to places like Holland and Germany. Aberdeen or Glasgow was the furthest we would go. It was not like it is now, it was so different.”