He had just pocketed the biggest prize cheque in the history of the sport. He had toppled the greatest player of the modern era. He had become the youngest world darts champion in history, doing so at the age of 17 years and 347 days, a record that may stand for generations. The world was at Luke Littler’s feet — and what did he want?
The dartboard.
The moment was caught on camera as part of the Netflix documentary Matchroom: The Greatest Showman, the fly-on-the-wall series charting the sporting empire built by Barry and Eddie Hearn. With the press conference over, the £500,000 winner’s cheque folded away, and the champagne presumably flowing somewhere, Littler — The Nuke, the prodigy, the phenomenon — sidled up to an official and asked, as casually as if he were after a spare pen: “Any chance of the match board?”
Wayne Mardle had watched Littler that night from the commentary booth, purring at his genius and marvelling at his nerve. But this? This left even the game’s great orator momentarily lost for words. The veteran pundit, who has spent two years running out of superlatives for what Littler produces on the oche, has regularly returned to one simple observation to make sense of the impossible teenager: he is still a child. Not in his darts — that part has been grown-up and ruthless from the very beginning — but in everything else that surrounds it. The kid who asks for the dartboard. The kid who grabs a kebab after winning. The kid who, by his own admission, spent days between World Championship rounds sitting at home “being lazy,” having not even brought a practice board to his accommodation.
“Just not practising, just being lazy in the house,” Littler himself cheerfully admitted during the 2026 World Championship. “Obviously, we’ve not brought our dartboard down. We stayed in the house last year and it worked. Last year — house, no board, won it.”
You couldn’t make it up. And yet it is precisely this quality — the glorious, utterly unselfconscious gap between Littler the darting monster and Littler the teenager — that has made him one of sport’s most fascinating figures.
At 19, he has now won back-to-back World Championships. He is ranked number one on the planet. His endorsement deal with Target Darts, signed in January 2026 following his second title, is reportedly worth up to £20 million over ten years. He has won five of the last six major TV events. His closest rival, Luke Humphries — himself a world champion — recently described him as “definitely a league above everyone.” Gian van Veen, runner-up in the 2026 final, said The Nuke was “not unstoppable” and then proceeded to get beaten 7-1.
None of that stopped him asking for the dartboard.
Mardle, who has been commentating on darts for Sky Sports since before Littler was born, has often spoken about the peculiar dual nature of watching the Warrington youngster. On the oche, there is a cold, preternatural composure — an ability to close out legs under pressure that draws comparisons with Phil Taylor in his prime. Off it, there is a disarming ordinariness. He loves pizza. He supports Manchester United. He once admitted he didn’t know what to do with himself on his days off. Darts is simply the thing he has always done, as natural to him as breathing. The sport’s own experts have noted that Littler “appeals to five-year-olds and 75-year-olds” — and moments like the matchboard request explain a good deal of why that is. Sky Sports
The request, it must be said, makes perfect emotional sense. Dartboards are not trophies. Nobody frames them or puts them in a cabinet. They are not the sort of thing you are presented with during a ceremony. But that World Championship board at Alexandra Palace — the one into which Littler had landed his final dart to defeat Michael van Gerwen 7-3 and claim £500,000 and sporting immortality — represented something that no amount of prize money could quite replicate. It was the physical scene of the crime, so to speak. The specific circle of sisal into which he had punched his way into history.
That Littler wanted it, and that he asked for it with such unselfconscious directness, says everything. There was no grand statement about posterity, no carefully managed PR moment — just a 17-year-old boy wondering if he could take a dartboard home.
Mardle, of course, has been tracking the evolution of Littler’s personality as closely as his averages. He watched with a complicated mixture of admiration and concern when, during the 2026 World Championship, a hostile section of the Alexandra Palace crowd booed Littler’s every throw against Rob Cross — and Littler responded with a televised broadside that became one of the most talked-about moments of the tournament. “Can I just say one thing? You guys pay for the tickets and you pay for my prize money — so thank you, thank you for my money! Thank you for booing me,” Sky Sports Littler told the crowd live on Sky Sports. Mardle’s assessment was blunt: “That was just odd. It was like he was looking for something and I just think he was getting antagonised.” Sky Sports
The incident passed. Littler won the tournament anyway. And when he reflected on the crowd furore afterwards, something interesting happened: he seemed to grow up slightly in the moment of describing it. “The fans are behind you, they’re not in front of you,” he said. “And what’s in front of you is a dartboard, and that’s what you’ve got to do.” Sky Sports
There it is again — the dartboard. Always the dartboard. The beginning and the end of everything for Luke Littler.
That is the central paradox that Mardle and every other observer has been grappling with since Littler first appeared at Alexandra Palace as a 16-year-old in 2024, startling the world and the top seeds in equal measure. As Mardle himself has put it, Littler “has proven time and time again that he can play better for longer than anyone.” Sky Sports Five of the last six major TV titles. Four televised nine-dart finishes. An MBE at 18. Honorary citizenship of Warrington.
And yet: “Any chance of the match board?”
It is, in its way, the most humanising request in modern sport. A boy who has everything, who has earned everything, who has terrified everyone — wanting to take the dartboard home like a kid who’s just played the game of his life in the back garden.
Mardle, for all his bemusement, knows better than most what it means. He has watched darts produce extraordinary talents over decades. He has never seen anything quite like this one. And when Littler wins the World Championship again next year — as the betting markets and his rivals increasingly seem to assume he will — it will be worth watching the post-press-conference footage very carefully.
That board will need to be nailed down.
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