Luke Littler sends rivals a message as he powers into world championship semi-finals

If Luke Littler’s rivals were envious of his earning power before, another £100,000 pocket money for a 17-year-old won’t cure their jealousy

By: irishmirror.ie

Jan 02 2025
0
3465 Views

Luke Littler sends rivals a me

Luke Littler is into the semi-finals of the Paddy Power PDC World Championship semi-final after a 5-2 win over Nathan Aspinall booked a showdown with No.8 seed Stephen Bunting on Thursday night.

If Luke Littler’s rivals were envious of his earning power before, another £100,000 pocket money for a 17-year-old won’t cure their jealousy.

Luke the Nuke began 2025 just as he spent the whole of 2024 - raking it in and making a sniper’s precision look ridiculously easy.

Littler is already guaranteed a minimum £100,000 prize money from this tournament, to add to the £1 million he banked in his debut season on the Professional Darts Corporation hamster wheel.

And the champion’s £500,000 jackpot his still his for the taking. But it’s not money which motivates the finest marksman since William Tell’s arrow took an apple off his son’s head.

In the next 36 hours, he could join the pantheon of sport’s greatest teenagers, from Pele winning the World Cup to Boris Becker conquering Wimbledon or Lester Pigott riding his first Derby winner.

Littler, who averaged 101.54 on the night, took his stockpile of maximums to 51 for the tournament, making him front-runner for the title sponsor’s Ballon d’Art for the most 180s.

And of the 19 legs he won, 10 occupied him 12 darts or fewer. In other words, he’s bang in form.

Any pretence that Littler’s magic carpet ride to the final 12 months ago was a flash in the pan went out of the window in his next game - against Aspinall in Bahrain.

The boy wonder hit a nine-darter with his first set of arrows, the young rascal, and three more perfect legs followed in 2024.

Ultimately, if he was miffed not to break Gerwyn Price and Michael van Gerwen’s record of four nine-darters in a calendar year, he hid his disappointment well.

In a whirlwind first set, which took 3min 33sec - roughly the same time it took Sebastian Coe to run a metric mile - Littler was imperious.

Aspinall, one of the oche’s good guys, had revealed before the first dart that Littler doesn’t have many close mates in the practice room because his rivals resent his success.

That may be true, but the Nuke’s got millions of admirers from afar, and none of the envious brigade are complaining that prize money and sponsorship rates are going through the roof because of a 17-year-old boy’s precocious talent.

With 10 minutes on the clock it was 2-0. If Littler’s fast starts, one of his hallmarks on his enchanted run at Ally Pally last year, had been conspicuous by their absence in earlier rounds, he was out of the blocks like Usain Bolt this time.

The procession turned into a contest when Aspinall took the third set against the throw, ending the nightmare prospect of a 5-0 anti-climax. There have been 12 quarter-final whitewashes in the PDC era, and the Asp - milking the crowd like a dairy maid - did not deserve to make it 13.

Get the latest sports headlines straight to your inbox by signing up for free email alerts.