As the world championship heads into the semi-final stage, it’s time to ask: has darts peaked? A receptive TV audience, with many stuck at home during the festive period, has witnessed the usual entertaining fare at the Alexandra Palace, but scoring is down, there wasn’t a single non-British player in the last eight for the first time since 2006, and the days of the great Phil Taylor seem an age ago.
The short answer is probably no. If darts were solely about headline numbers, you might say yes. But as any acolyte of the tungsten tussle knows, though it comes down to numerical exactitude, darts is about so much more. It is among the finest sporting theatre, a distillation of what nerves can do.
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