“You’ve got Littler in the back room literally on his phone doing nothing” – Difference in work ethic between Phil Taylor and the 19-year-old world champion laid bare

Phil Taylor and Luke Littler were both asked the same question. Both gave honest answers. And the contrast, as Sky Sports presenter Polly James laid it out on the Double Tops Podcast this week, could hardly have been more striking.

James had been at an event attended by Taylor when she decided to put the question to the 16-time world champion directly, in a room full of young darts players eager for any wisdom the greatest in the sport’s history might offer. What would he tell the next generation — those hoping to turn a natural aptitude at the oche into something more?

Taylor’s answer, she said, was immediate and uncomplicated: try to hit two 180s every night before you go to bed. Work. Practise. Put in the hours, every single day, without exception. It was a philosophy that defined his career — 87 major titles, a span of dominance that spanned more than two decades, built on a work ethic so relentless it is still spoken about with a kind of reverence in the sport.

Then James drew the comparison she had clearly been sitting on. Littler had offered his own version of the same advice at a different point — stay off social media, she noted, and chase your dreams. It is fine counsel, and not without value. But it was what she added next that captured the distance between two generations’ approaches.

“He’s a very staunch advocate of just working your arse off, basically,” James said of Taylor on the podcast, “while you’ve got Littler in the back room literally on his phone doing nothing.”

The line landed as a joke — lightly delivered, contextually clear. James was not criticising Littler so much as illustrating, with affectionate sharpness, the paradox at the heart of his brilliance. Here is a player who has won two world championships before his 20th birthday, who averaged 108 to win the Poland Darts Open this weekend, who has already accumulated ten PDC major titles — and by all available accounts, he does not hammer a practice board for three hours a day in the manner Taylor prescribed. He is, in the most literal and frustrating sense for his opponents, just like that.

It is a tension the sport has wrestled with since Littler emerged. His own coach has spoken about the looseness of his preparation relative to what most top professionals would consider the minimum. Littler himself has been candid about the fact that he does not agonise over his game in the way others might, that he trusts what comes naturally, that when things go wrong — as they have in the opening weeks of this year’s Premier League, where he sits sixth in the table — he does not panic or overhaul his routine, but simply waits for it to correct.

“It’s not the best start but there’s still 13 weeks left to get into that top four,” Littler said after lifting the Poland Darts Open title on Sunday. “I’ve got loads of time. This weekend has given me massive confidence going into Belfast. I need to start picking up now and start playing better on Thursday.”

It is the kind of statement Taylor would never have made — not because he was any less confident, but because for Taylor, the idea that you could be on your phone in the back room and then go out and average 108 in a tournament final simply would not have been conceivable. You earned it. You ground it out. You hit those 180s before bed, night after night, for years.

Littler, of course, respects Taylor deeply. When asked earlier this year at the Premier League launch whether he could claim the title of the greatest ever player, given Luke Humphries had bestowed it on him, he demurred immediately. Taylor won 16 world titles, Littler pointed out. Until he matches that, the conversation does not apply. “It’s really good to hear,” he said of Humphries’ assessment, “but I’m not one of those to go off and say, ‘Yeah, I am the best’ — because I’m not the best.”

Taylor’s influence is there, in the reverence if not in the method. What James has illuminated is something that will become one of the defining questions of Littler’s career: whether the talent is so extraordinary that the orthodox rules about preparation and graft simply do not apply — or whether, at some point, the phone goes away and the real work begins.

For now, the evidence of Kraków suggests the answer remains tantalisingly, infuriatingly unclear. He averaged 108. He won. He is, quite possibly, going to Belfast on Thursday with barely a dart thrown in anger since Sunday evening. And somewhere, Phil Taylor is hitting 180s before bed.