They call 1 January, world championship quarter-final day, the greatest day in the darting calendar. Well: come back in another 364 days to see if there’s been a better match than this. Michael van Gerwen is a semi-finalist again, beating Callan Rydz, and if the headline facts feel unremarkable enough, then rarely, if ever, will he have been pushed, challenged and interrogated as he was here by the likeable Geordie.

Rydz, perhaps the outstanding performer to this point, was magnificent, outdoing the great Van Gerwen on almost every conceivable metric. He won 18 legs to 17. He averaged 104 to van Gerwen’s 103. He edged checkouts 46% to 45%. He hit 17 180s to Van Gerwen’s 14, at a rate of almost one every other leg. He showed bottle beyond belief, levelling at 1-1, again at 2-2, then pulling one back to trail 4-3 when everyone assumed Van Gerwen would cruise to victory.

The talent was always there. Anyone who saw Rydz in his 2021 breakout season will know how hot his hot streaks can run. But somehow he was never quite able to take the next step. They called him soft, surly, lacking in backbone. Nobody will ever be able to say that about him again.

Rydz played far, far better than Scott Williams did in bundling Van Gerwen out at the same stage 12 months ago. That Van Gerwen was thus able to match him, and then defeat him, was evidence that the Dutchman’s title challenge is no illusion.

This was the first time he had been scheduled in an afternoon slot on this stage since late 2013, a measure of how his star has waned since his peak years. But this was some response: a lesson in resilience, in sensing the big moments and seizing them, and in the tapered peaks of set play this is the greatest talent of all. Afterwards, someone told Van Gerwen about the match stats. He simply held up three fingers on one hand and five on the other. “The set format is totally different,” he said. “There are moments when you have to play well.”

As for his afternoon slot, there was no hint of wounded pride. It’s just business: he knows that better than anyone. “There’s two sides of the draw, and of course they have to pick Wonder Boy in the evening,” he said of Luke Littler. “If they tell me I have to play on Mars tomorrow, I’m going to try and book a ticket to Mars. I don’t give a fuck.”

After the toughest year of his career, Van Gerwen is now all business. The pivotal moment came at the end of an electrifying fifth set, when Rydz missed double top for a 3-2 lead and Van Gerwen claimed it with a piercing double one and an equally piercing volley of noise. When he took the sixth set for a 4-2 lead, the match had seemingly been put to sleep.

But Rydz did not waver. A magnificent 12-dart finish secured him the seventh set, and the eighth also went to a deciding leg. When Rydz left himself 96 after nine darts, we were seemingly going all the way. But Van Gerwen found his extra gear, found seven trebles out of nine, and when Rydz missed two at double 18 for the set, he converted with a 12-dart leg of his own for the match.

Thursday’s semi-final throws Van Gerwen up against Chris Dobey, who came through his own trial of tremolos against Gerwyn Price in the first quarter-final. Again Price surged into an imperious two-set lead; again he collapsed on the outer ring to let his opponent back in; this time, despite a reprieve at 4-2 when Dobey missed five darts for the match, his game did not recover.

For Dobey, it was an exorcism of sorts, a year to the day after he threw away a 4-0 lead to lose 5-4 against Rob Cross at the same stage. He is a tougher, wiser player these days, but he will still need to find more levels against the irresistible Van Gerwen, who thus far has answered every question posed of him.

In the first game of the evening session, Stephen Bunting blew away Peter Wright 5-2. It was a ruthlessly professional performance against an admittedly subdued Wright, who was never going to recreate his heroics against Luke Humphries in the last 16. Despite another decent night on the doubles, and a fleeting fightback from 4-0 down, his scoring power was never good enough. Bunting’s win puts him into the world’s top five and almost guarantees him an appearance in next year’s Premier League.