Gerwyn Price is giving a tour of his man cave. Built last year in the basement of his home in Markham, Caerphilly, it features a championship size snooker table, a pool table, armchairs upholstered from his former darts shirts, its own kitchen and bar, and a cinema room with starlit planetarium ceiling. “It’s a good place to get away when I need an hour to myself,” he says. “Probably play snooker more than darts. Which might be the problem!”

Highest break? “On that table? I’ve had a 96. Highest ever, 108. I won’t do a Shaun Murphy and lie about having a 147!” Price cackles, referencing the snooker player’s unverified and much ridiculed claim to have once hit a nine-dart finish in the pub.

Price is on good form today. To be brutally honest, these days you are never quite sure what Price you are going to encounter: belligerent, doleful, testy, tired, provocative, wisecracking, withdrawn. For much of the past year he has been a ghost of himself, on and off the oche; passive on the stage, wayward on the board, occasionally dropping vague hints that he is scarcely fussed either way. But, on the eve of his return to the world championship, there is a different energy to Price. There’s a spark and a spikiness. “I’m back,” he says. “I’m more confident than ever going into the world championship. Probably more confident than when I won in 2021.”

Huge if true. Particularly given the way 2024 has gone for him, a bad dream unfolding in slow motion, a poor Premier League followed by a poor everything else. He didn’t get past the last 16 of any major. He failed to qualify for the Grand Slam, a tournament he has won three times in the past six years. On this year’s ranking money, Price is No 31 in the world. “I usually find another gear in June, July,” he says. “But for some reason that just never happened.”

In large part Price blames the new Professional Darts Corporation schedule, a relentless seven-day treadmill that offers precious little time to rest or recuperate, to reflect or iron out dips in form. Pro Tour Monday to Wednesday. Premier League Thursday. European Tour at the weekend. “It was tough but it was bearable,” he says of the old schedule. “But now you have to miss tournaments. And it’s trying to pick the right ones to miss.”

Somewhere along the line, Price simply lost sight of himself. “Rolling off the back of the Premier League, my mindset wasn’t there,” he says. “I was just turning up and going through the motions. And that’s not the way to play darts.” Did he seek any kind of professional advice? “No. That’s probably where I went wrong. I probably should have got some help. But I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind. The fish and chip shop I own. Sorting out this house. So I probably wasn’t as focused as I should have been.”

There was only one real cure for this malaise, and circumstances were about to impose it on him. Failure to qualify for the Grand Slam, followed by an early exit at the Players Championship Finals, came with the silver lining of an extended break. He celebrated his daughters’ birthdays. He celebrated his wedding anniversary at home for the first time. But consigned to his cave, something also began to stir in him.

“Whenever I was away, I wanted to be home, and whenever I was home I wanted to be away,” he says. “And when I was home for three weeks … I didn’t know what to do with myself. I realised that when I’m off darts, there’s pretty much nothing else to do. The kids are in school. All my mates and friends are in work or doing other things. So yes, it’s nice to be home. But I’ve realised I prefer to be away. I know now that my life is darts. And I just need to get on with it, and stop being so negative.”

Did he watch the Grand Slam? “I seen little bits of it. Bits and pieces.” Did it spark something in him? “Nah, not really. I just needed a break. Now I feel refreshed. Like I want to be there. Like being a kid again. Like when I first started playing. It’s made me fall in love with the game again. The last two weeks, I’ve played some of the best darts I’ve played since 2020. I haven’t just beaten some of the best players in the world, I’ve absolutely blown them away.”

Over recent weeks, exhibition crowds across Europe have become reacquainted with the new, hungrier Price. “I know they’re only exhibitions, but we all want to win,” he says. “Myself, Luke Humphries, Stephen Bunting, Michael van Gerwen, Michael Smith. We all want to win the night and take that momentum into the world championship.

“ And I blew them all away. Everything was there. I was enjoying it on stage. I was interacting with the crowd. I was giving it all that. And my game was just back. The Gerwyn Price of old.”

What is beyond doubt is that the landscape of the sport has changed remorselessly since Price was last throwing his best stuff. Humphries and Luke Littler are at the top of the game. Mike De Decker and Wessel Nijman are snapping at their heels. What of the established guard? “The boys that were consistent are way off the mark,” Price says. “Van Gerwen, Smith, myself, Jonny Clayton. We’ve opened the floodgates for all these other boys. So it’s up to us to step back up, put them back where they belong.”

The snarl is back. The swagger is back. Of course, to a large extent, this is a kind of salesmanship, an incantation, perhaps even a form of self-kidology. But Price at his best was always a player driven by unusual quantities of brute will and pure belief. The art of actively courting disdain, not caring what anybody else thought, even when he actually did. “I’m a born winner,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if I’m playing for £500,000 in Alexandra Palace, or playing my mate for a pint on the snooker table. That’s just built in me.”

He doesn’t need the money these days. He has the chip shop, a property portfolio and numerous business interests to fall back on. But then money was never the point in the first place. Talk of retirement, he says, “was blown out of proportion. I mean, I’m 39. I said I’d either retire when I got to 50 houses or 50 years of age. So I’ve got another 10-11 years left in me, if not more.” And the houses? “Way off,” he says with a smile.

“In my head,” Price says, “I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve. I’ve got a lot more to give. And I will win a lot more over the next year. If I play my game like I know I can, nobody beats me. We can all say it, but you’ve got to do it on the dartboard, and it’s going to start on Monday night.”

There is another important aspect to the Price man cave. All great caves boast great cave art, and the walls of Price’s basement retreat are festooned with framed shirts and framed photographs, trophy-winning moments captured and commemorated. There is a kind of primal irony here: the place where Price goes to escape from the world is constantly reminding him of how he conquered it. The comfort he possesses now was earned only through the discomfort he endured before.

For prehistoric man, the cave was his sanctuary, his pride, the deserved spoils of his labour. But first he had to leave it.