I gave your ma a dart last night.
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Oooofftt
Wayhey… One hundred and eigggggghhhhhttttty
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Why do you think mate? He is black, thats why. Simple.
Durrant said himself his loss of form has nothing to do with Covid. Think he has lost his bottle basically, his nerve is gone. Very snatchy throw which does not help
Fun fact: Florian Hempel is the great grandson of Eduard Hempel, Hitler’s man in Ireland during the war.
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Your knowledge of fascists knows no bounds. That’s a zinger
Glen Durrant: ‘You begin to overthink, like a golfer having the yips. I was in panic mode’
This time last year the former BDO world champion had just won the darts Premier League at the first attempt, but he already knew something was starting to go wrong
There are the times when Glen Durrant wakes up and tells himself that this is going to be the day. The day it all clicks. The day he feels like a triple world champion again. The day he feels something again. There are the times when he is watching old clips of himself and spots something and leaps upstairs to his practice room, convinced he’s identified the one tweak that will make everything all right again.
Then there were the darker times. During the Premier League earlier this year, he would lie in his Milton Keynes hotel room with the lights out and his clothes on, wondering where it had all gone wrong. There was the time he went back to his old pub, the Cargo Fleet Club in Middlesbrough, to throw a few arrows with friends. But he was recognised instantly and a crowd began to gather and suddenly all the old frailties and tensions returned to the point where he could barely let go of the dart.
There are the people who heckle him when he goes out. There are the people who have nothing but sympathy and good wishes, which is almost worse. Everyone wants to know what happened. How a player can reach the pinnacle and then just keep falling, endlessly falling. How the Premier League champion of 2020 can win one match in nine months. Durrant thinks he knows exactly what happened. But knowing it and fixing it are two entirely different things.
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This is not a sob story. Durrant wants to be very clear about that. “It’s been a traumatic year,” he says now from his home in Middlesbrough, “but I’m quite philosophical about everything. I’m not sat crying at home, feeling sorry for myself. If you ask me a question, I’ll give you an honest answer. That’s my values, the way I’ve been brought up. Darts has been very, very good to me, and you take the good with the bad.”
And the good times were plentiful. A housing officer for most of his life, Durrant came late to professional darts, and yet in a few years won more than most players win in a lifetime. In 2017, at the age of 46, he won the British Darts Organisation world title for the first time. After two more world titles he switched to the more lucrative Professional Darts Corporation, quickly surging up the rankings. Last year, he became only the third player after Phil Taylor and Michael van Gerwen to top the Premier League table, before beating Nathan Aspinall in the final to claim his first PDC major.
As he turned 50, Durrant had finally made good on his promise. Likeable, down-to-earth and battle-hardened, a glorious career autumn was unfolding before him. But already the cracks were beginning to appear in his action. “If you look at the Premier League final, there was something creeping into my game,” he says. “It’s not a natural throw. It’s pretty mechanical. I knew I was extending my arm too far back. Then you begin to overthink, and you start losing, and the confidence aspect comes into it. Like a golfer having the yips, or a footballer who can’t score from six yards out … I was in panic mode.”
It was the perfect time for a break, a rest, a reset. Instead, six hours after winning the Premier League he was on a plane to Germany to take part in a small European Tour event. A week later, he tested positive for Covid at Frankfurt Airport and was seriously ill for weeks, coughing so much he popped a rib. “That was pretty much the beginning of the implosion,” he says. “I just wish I hadn’t got on that plane. In hindsight, I was shattered.”
Results continued to slide. In April this year he pitched up at Milton Keynes to defend his Premier League title, only to be eliminated after losing his first nine games in a row, getting humiliated on live television night after night. “Getting battered 7-0 or 7-1, and then heading back to a hotel room, no family around you, nine nights on the spin,” he remembers. “That takes a lot out of you.”
Desperate for a win, any win, he returned to the smaller floor events, only to keep losing in the first round. One game, he was throwing so poorly he simply picked up his darts, shook hands and drove home. “I decided to go back to the local leagues, and that was an absolute disaster,” he says. “Every dart I was pulling and snatching. I went to Redcar races with my daughter and a guy shouted: ‘Now then Glen, are you still playing snooker?’ I said no. And he went: ‘Well you should be, because you’re shite at darts.’ And then about 20 people started laughing. People have such short memories.”
Durrant’s world ranking was still high enough to earn him entry to major tournaments, but with his confidence in pieces it often felt more like an elaborate form of torture. At the World Grand Prix in October he was eliminated with an average of just 58, barely pub standard. As he prepares to face William O’Connor on Wednesday in the first game of the world championship, he has lost 27 of his last 28 matches stretching back to March. Fans, pundits and rivals have long since united in solidarity and sadness.
“I don’t want that,” he insists. “I don’t want Michael Smith and all them saying nice things about me. The last thing I wanted was sympathy. I want people to hate me. I want to get under their skin. Gerwyn Price called me a fat elephant once. The niceness is nice, but I preferred it when people were horrible to me. Because it meant I was winning.
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“I’ve never once contemplated retiring. I’m realistic; I don’t have the dream of being a world champion again. All I want is to be competitive. I don’t want to be: ‘God, remember that guy who won the Premier League and capitulated within 18 months?’ I want to be someone who reached rock bottom, and started climbing back up.”
In a way, the plight of Durrant is a cautionary tale for darts as a whole: a sport still largely resistant to coaching and analysis, where the magic can come in an instant and often disappears just as quickly. After retirement Durrant says he wants to use his experiences as a coach and mentor.
For now, though, he has a career to salvage, and on the biggest stage of all. “My only focus for a long time has been Ally Pally,” he says. “If I can raise my game there, then as bad as the year’s been, it wouldn’t be the biggest disaster of all.”
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9 darter William Borland up against Ryan Searle first up today in the afternoon around 12.30pm.
Should be good.
What time is William O’Connor on?
He is second up.
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Here we go. Let’s darts
Glen Durrant.
So sad.
Needs to call it a career, a shadow of himself.
Dullard 2 sets up vs Duzza
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Never thought the ally pally would attract such a liberal elite remoaner crowd.
Too easy for William but he’ll take that.
Lousy on durrant
Duzza needs to get back into auditing after that
That sky darts crowd are not proper darts people
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