She has spent years watching the sport’s greatest players up close, but it was a single exchange at a darts event this week that gave Sky Sports presenter Polly James the clearest illustration she has ever seen of what separates the legends from the prodigies.
James, one of the lead reporters for Sky’s darts coverage and a co-host of the official Premier League podcast Double Tops, found herself in a room alongside Phil Taylor — a man who won 16 world titles and 87 major trophies by doing things one very specific way. She put a question to him that seemed simple enough on its face: what would you tell young players who want to reach the top?
Taylor’s answer, she told her podcast audience, was immediate. Try to hit two 180s every night before you go to bed. Nothing complicated. Nothing revolutionary. Just relentless, unglamorous repetition — the kind of work ethic that underpinned a career most professionals can only dream about and that Taylor pursued, by all accounts, with something close to obsession.
Then James offered the contrast that stopped the conversation in its tracks.
“He’s a very staunch advocate of just working your arse off, basically,” she said of Taylor, “while you’ve got Littler in the back room literally on his phone doing nothing.”
It was not said as a criticism. James knows both men well enough to understand exactly what she was describing — and what she was describing was not laziness so much as a kind of bewildering, almost unfair naturalness. Luke Littler is 19 years old, has won back-to-back world championships, owns ten PDC major titles, and averaged 108 to win the Poland Darts Open last weekend. And by the available evidence, he is not drilling 180s before bed. He is doing whatever 19-year-olds do, apparently including scrolling through his phone in the players’ area, and then walking out and doing things with a set of darts that most professionals spend entire careers trying to replicate.
It is the paradox that has followed Littler since he emerged, and one that Taylor himself — to his credit — seems to find more fascinating than troubling. The two men have spoken warmly of each other publicly, with Littler consistently refusing to place himself above the 16-time world champion when the greatest-ever debate is raised.
“It’s really good to hear,” Littler said at the Premier League launch in Newcastle when Luke Humphries labelled him the greatest darts player who ever lived, “but I’m not one of those to go off and say ‘Yeah, I am the best’ — because I’m not the best.” For Littler, Taylor’s record remains the ceiling. 16 world titles is the number that matters, and until he approaches it, the conversation ends there.
Yet the philosophical gap between them is real, and James has put her finger on something the sport has been quietly wrestling with throughout Littler’s rise. Taylor’s method was the method — the way serious players were supposed to approach the game. Sacrifice, structure, sacrifice again. His training sessions are the stuff of legend. The question his career was built on was always: how many hours have you put in?
Littler seems to be asking a different question entirely, or perhaps not asking one at all. He arrives, he throws, he wins. He heads back to the hotel and checks his phone.
That said, Littler knows the Premier League is not going entirely to plan. He sits sixth in the table after the opening three nights, and acknowledged after Kraków that things need to sharpen up on Thursdays. “It’s not the best start but there’s still 13 weeks left to get into that top four,” he said. “I need to start picking up now and start playing better on Thursday.”
Phil Taylor, one suspects, would have been on the practice board already. Whether Littler follows suit, or whether he simply trusts that the talent will take care of itself, may go some way to determining just how many of those 16 world titles he eventually catches.
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