Premier League Darts’ Darkest Day Saw Coins and Lager Hurled on Glasgow Stage
With the Premier League roadshow having just departed Glasgow following night three of the 2026 season — a night on which Josh Rock was booed during his walk-on for making a Rangers hand gesture at the Celtic-heavy crowd — it is worth recalling that darts has seen far, far worse in that city. Much worse, in fact. The kind of worse that left scars, prompted a world champion to claim he had thrown a match, and forced the PDC to look hard at how it managed big nights in Scotland.
The year was 2011. The setting was week eight of that year’s Premier League. And the two players walking out were Gary Anderson and Adrian Lewis — the reigning world champion who had beaten the home crowd’s beloved Scotsman in the Alexandra Palace final just a few months earlier.
The context could hardly have been more combustible. Lewis, known as ‘Jackpot’, had defeated Anderson in one of the most dramatic finals in World Championship history in early January. Now he was walking onto a stage in Glasgow — Anderson’s adopted home — in front of a crowd that had been watching Rangers lose to PSV Eindhoven that same evening. Some of those fans, it would subsequently emerge, had come straight from the pub to the darts. The mood was already sour before a dart had been thrown.
From the first leg, Lewis was booed every time he stepped up to the oche. Then things escalated. Lewis stepped back mid-throw during the first leg, needing 68 for the set, and gestured towards the crowd. He had felt something hit him. He pointed it out to the match referee. It only made the noise louder.
What followed was one of the most disturbing scenes in the sport’s modern history. Coins were thrown at the reigning world champion. Pints of lager were hurled onto the stage. Lewis stood in the middle of it all, unable to throw without projectiles landing around him. “There were a few coins throwing. The thing was, I mean, them coins could have gone anywhere,” Lewis later told the Mirror. “Gary was on the stage next to me. We could both hear them all thudding against the stage. Yes, it wasn’t the best experience, let’s put it that way.”
Anderson, despite being the home favourite, was appalled by what he was watching. His best friend was being pelted with coins on a darts stage. During leg nine, he stopped mid-throw, bent down, picked up a coin from the floor, pocketed it and aimed some well-chosen words at the crowd. He was furious — visibly, openly furious.
And then, remarkably, Lewis won. Despite everything, despite the coins and the lager and the sustained hostility, he reeled off five consecutive legs to win 8-3. The crowd, as he approached the finish line, went quiet. Perhaps they were ashamed. Perhaps they simply ran out of ammunition.
What came next was even more extraordinary. Four years later, Anderson was asked by BBC Scotland whether he had deliberately lost the match in protest at the crowd’s behaviour. He replied: “Yes. I didn’t want to win a game where that happened. I thought it was a disgrace.” He added: “It was bad that night. I’m a proud Scotsman but when that happened, it sickened me.”
The comments caused immediate uproar. Anderson subsequently took to social media to clarify, insisting he would never intentionally throw a match. “I would never intentionally lose a match, nor step on the oche to give anything other than my best,” he wrote. “But that night I thought the crowd behaviour was so disgraceful I lost all my motivation to win and was completely unable to concentrate. It wasn’t a question of not wanting to win, I just found myself without the ability to do so because I felt so ashamed of what was happening I could not focus at all on playing.” The PDC accepted Anderson’s clarification while acknowledging how his original words had landed.
The episode left a lasting mark on the sport. “The PDC learnt a lot from that game,” Lewis later said. Security was tightened. Protocols around crowd management in Glasgow were reviewed. And the sport has not seen anything close to that level of disorder in Scotland since — a fact that speaks to how seriously the organisation took what had happened.
It is important context when the conversation turns, as it has this week, to questions about crowd behaviour in darts. Rock being booed for waving a 3-1 at the camera is pantomime; it is football rivalry transferred to a darts venue, and Rock himself loved every second of it. A fan throwing an iPhone onto a Kraków stage during a Daryl Gurney interview is alarming in isolation but resolved itself without injury. The crowd hostility that Luke Humphries faced from Polish supporters is a recurring topic that the sport is actively grappling with.
None of it, however, is coins and lager being hurled at a world champion as he stood on a Premier League stage. Glasgow 2011 remains the benchmark by which the sport measures how bad things can get — and a reminder of exactly why those lessons needed to be learned.
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