Nathan Aspinall probably thinks he just took part in a game of darts. And look, his name was definitely on the scoreboard, and you may have glimpsed him on your television grinning away in the background, and in a few days’ time there will be a hefty bank transfer from the Professional Darts Corporation confirming he did, indeed, participate.
But while Aspinall may have been here corporeally, in a very real sense he wasn’t actually here at all. He was essentially a tower of pixels, a mannequin, an uncredited extra, the silent letter in the middle of a word. He was one of those characters in a noughties video game who walks into a wall and disappears. He was the latest player to stand between Luke Littler and world domination, and that turned out exactly the way you might expect.
Federer at Wimbledon; Messi at the Camp Nou; Littler at Ally Pally. This has become the hottest ticket in town, a bucket-list event, the sort of experience you mean to tell the grandchildren about, if you can stay sober enough to remember what happened. They sing along to his Pitbull walk-on music as he enters the stage, and carry on singing it long after the backing track has died away. They plead with him the way people used to plead to gods. Come on. Show us magic. Show us miracles. Turn water into nine.
In fact, there are times watching Littler when the sense of spectacle is so visceral, so direct, so transactional, that you occasionally forget this is actually a sporting contest with an opponent and a winning line. Pretty much the only times Aspinall was even a peripheral force came when Littler briefly got caught up in his own hoopla, missed a few doubles, cooled and blunted a little, offering him a fleeting and largely undeserved sniff.
And in all fairness to Aspinall, a double major champion and a giant of this sport in his own right, this was one of his best performances of a tough and chastening year. Beset by wrist and elbow injuries, absent from the Grand Slam and next to nowhere in any of the other majors, Aspinall is one of those players who has always trusted himself to raise his game for the big occasion.
He fired in 11 maximums, pinched a couple of sets, averaged 96 (a figure probably inflated a little by the sheer number of legs in which he never got a whiff of a double). But from the moment Littler took out 105 for the opening leg and breezed to a 2-0 lead in about 10 minutes, there was never any realistic doubt about the outcome. Aspinall played along, giggled along, even threw some decent stuff. But he was only ever the sidekick.
Afterwards there were no tears, no sigh of relief, none of the uncoiled tension we saw in his matches against Ryan Meikle or Ryan Joyce. He was perhaps a little wayward on bull and double 10, but otherwise he was utterly deadly in the 80-100 range, piling up the two-treble visits, ruthless when he needed to be.
“The crowd wanted a comeback, but I just wanted to finish it,” Littler said. “It feels like last year: I’m playing with absolute confidence, I’m playing with freedom.”
And so the kid is now a semi-finalist again, two games from immortality. He will play Stephen Bunting on Thursday night, and while Bunting looked mightily impressive in disposing of the resurgent Peter Wright in the first game of the evening, it’s hard to imagine him staying with Littler’s scoring power, the way he forces you to hit 11- and 12-dart legs simply to keep pace, the way he distracts you from your game with the brilliance of his.
