One HUNDred and EIGHTY!

QoS was one of the hoi polloi at Ally Pally last night to witness the world number one Phil “The Power” Taylor beat Australian Simon Whitlock 7-3 in the PDC darts World Championship, his fifteenth such triumph in total (13 PDC, 2 BDO the rival organisation).

There’s no doubt, this is a well managed operation. The man at the heart of it? Barry Hearn, the eighties snooker impresario, who has cleverly rebranded darts in an attempt to draw in the middle-classes - this is exemplified in the food court pumping out arch Mockney songsters Blur, with their vicarious vignettes of working-class life.

The hors d’oeuvre is that piece of old baggage, the third-place play-off, sadistically conceived to compound the misery of the losing semi-finalists and bore the spectators to death. The competitors, going after the carrot of an extra £20k, are Raymond van Barneveld, the genial Dutchman (a near tautology) and Mark Webster, a plain-looking southpaw from Wales. Thankfully, the organisers have at least had the sense to make it a (relatively) short sharp shoot-out with the first to ten legs the winner.

What is immediately apparent is that, even with double-tops vision, you ain’t gonna see anything from any position in the house (sorry, palace) and you are as completely reliant upon the TV cameras as the home-viewer. The cameramen: two stoical blokes trained on the board and a boom operator for the player shots during play and the crowd shots in-between times.

‘Barney’ is clearly completely uninterested and is just going through the motions – he’s won the thing five times and simply doesn’t want to be here. It’s a much bigger deal for ‘Webby’ (quelle surprise!), who does at least manage the odd sheepish crowd acknowledgement. Someone spies Ronnie O’Sullivan in the VIP area and that’s the final nail in the coffin for the match as regards attention. Webster takes it 10-8.

The first thing you notice about Phil Taylor as he takes the stage is just how fat he is – this guy is rotunda! He is not a natural showman – the strut is too forced for one thing - but if you’re as dominant as he is, personality, or the lack of it, is largely irrelevant.

His opponent, in the first to seven sets contest (each set being the best of five legs), is the unseeded Aussie Simon “The Wizard” Whitlock, much taller than Taylor with a dodgy pony tail and an even dodgier beard but at least he has a bit of menace in the eyes.

As far as these things are discernable to the layman, Taylor seems to have the better style – he has a natural follow-through whereas Whitlock has a somewhat constipated stance (probably attributable to his height in fairness) and a clipped staccato throwing action that looks a bit “Red Lion”. It’s high quality stuff from the off and the 180s are soon being LEDed down. The first four sets are shared and the consensus in the crowd is that Whitlock is playing out of his skin. Unfortunately, Whitlock can’t maintain this standard and Taylor relentlessly takes the next four sets. Although he doesn’t post as many maximums as Whitlock, Taylor puts in the more decisive check-outs (including a ‘170’ and a ‘167’). There is a glimmer of hope when Whitlock takes the ninth set but Taylor snuffs out any chance of a comeback and seals the match 7-3 with a ‘131’ check-out. His reward? £200k (Whitlock pockets £100k).

Yes, Jeff, but is it sport? Aye, there’s the question. On any detached reasoning, no. There is no cardiovascular strain, the majority of players are overweight and the action is quasi-autistic – you might indeed as well be watching tiddlywinks or John Barnes vs. Paul Gascoigne at “Kicking a Lucozade can into the bin from 5 yards.” Unlike in snooker, there is no scope for novelty – this is why the likes of Jimmy White and O’Sullivan will always garner more attention than even the most ‘talented’ outré arrowman – they come up with (often biomechanically hard-to-implement) contextual solutions to one-off situations.

Whatever its intrinsic sporting value (approximately zero), where darts does have the edge on snooker, is in its educational value for teaching arithme..ah, sorry,…is that it is de facto a great facilitator for good old-fashioned bawdy revelry. Perhaps Hearn might be able to engender some of this spirit at the way too po-faced Crucible when he looks to revamp snooker next.