Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 16

Gerwyn Price: ‘Having a break made me fall in love with darts again’

Welshman has had a poor year but says he has refound his spark with the world championship about to start

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.

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Alexandra Palace is a venue that fits, but will darts outgrow it one day? | Jonathan Liew

All 90,000 world championship tickets sold out in 15 minutes, so it seems a matter of time before money talks

They’re always finding stuff here. Every time the trustees of Alexandra Palace undertake some renovation work on the 151-year-old building, they discover artefacts from the venue’s past: a kind of people’s history in detritus. Usually it’s just rusty coins and ticket stubs. But then there was the time they found perfectly preserved vials of early prototype tetanus vaccine embedded in a wall, a relic from when the place was a first world war hospital. Or a bit of Victorian era graffiti from a disgruntled tradesman, reading: “The wages of sin is death, the wages of a carpenter is worse.”

What will they find of today, decades hence, in the palace’s dusty niches and beneath its rotting floorboards? What will the archivists of the future make of the crumpled nun’s wimple, the faded receipt for a halloumi pitta pocket (only £12.50 at 2024 prices), the multiple small plastic sachets containing traces of mysterious white powdery residue? What stories will they tell of us, here, now?

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Double tops: Lukes lead way but world darts championship field is wide open

Last season’s finalists Littler and Humphries start favourites but the field of potential winners is wider than ever

The double two. At the end of the seventh set. Luke Littler’s on 58, two darts left, but he thinks he’s on 68. He hits the treble-18. Realises what he’s done. Steps away. Steps up. Misses the double two that would have put him 5-2 up in the world championship final. Loses the next five sets in a row. In his idler moments Littler sometimes watches this match back, and this is the point at which he has to turn off.


There’s a good case for anointing that double two as the most famous missed dart in the history of the sport. It’s either that or Michael van Gerwen’s double-12 after 17 perfect darts in the 2014 semi-final. The point is that nowhere else does so much taper down to so little, so quickly. Over the first year of his professional career Littler has thrown – at a rough estimate – about 30,000 darts in competition. Most are instantly forgotten. But some you remember.

The rise of the 16-year-old prodigy was the story of last season’s world championships, perhaps one of the great underdog stories in sport. As Littler macheted his way through a kind draw, a wave of hype and hope began to gather at his feet, hoisting him to some of the most deific levels of darting artistry ever dreamed. There were tall tales and midnight kebabs, songs and memes, VIP selfies and bleary-eyed slots on breakfast television. Darts was cool. Darts was in. Darts was the story. And yet, as a result of that missed double two, it is a story that remains incomplete.

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Steven Gerrard grimaces in joyless Saudi slide into sporting irrelevance | Jonathan Liew

As a player he could always manifest greatness but the club that adored him and the game he bestrode has left him behind

Occasionally, at various opportune or triumphant moments in his career – posing for a photograph, say, or receiving a medal or trophy – Steven Gerrard has been called upon to smile. This is a challenge that has almost invariably proven beyond him. Take – by way of illustration – his famous goal against Olympiakos in the Champions League, 20 years ago last Sunday. We all remember what happens: header, ball drops, Gerrard smashes it in from distance and tears off in celebration, fists flying, teammates in pursuit.

But is he smiling? Not really! Something is definitely happening to his face: a sort of simultaneous compression and explosion. And clearly he prefers this state of affairs to any alternative. But you would probably characterise his expression – at one of the most memorable and satisfying moments of his career – as more of a growl, a scream of rage and defiance and exorcism and vindication. Happiness: by and large, this was something Gerrard preferred to leave to others.

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Rejected Iwobi and Smith Rowe giving Arsenal and Fulham reason to believe

It stung Mikel Arteta to let their academy graduates go, but it’s a sign of progress for a wiser and more ruthless club

“You’re the future, man. I felt it from the first day. Number 10, captain in the future.” Granit Xhaka knew it. Everyone who saw Emile Smith Rowe play from the moment he joined the Arsenal academy at the age of nine knew it. Problem was, there came a point when Smith Rowe had to stop being the future and that’s how Smith Rowe ends up walking out to play against Arsenal, for someone else, on Sunday afternoon.

He’s not the only one. Fulham host Arsenal at Craven Cottage with four ex-Arsenal players in their ranks. Bernd Leno will be in goal. Smith Rowe and Alex Iwobi will be in midfield. Reiss Nelson is injured, but would not have been able to play under the terms of his loan. It is these last three, all graduates of Hale End in east London, who tell the real story: of the Arsenal that was, Arsenal as it became, the Arsenal that might yet be.

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Battered and bruised Everton must turn the end of Goodison into a new beginning | Jonathan Liew

Weather the storm of the famous ground’s final league derby and it can be a renewal for a club going nowhere for so long

The deluge came earlier this week, with a bitterly appropriate sense of timing. As the precursor to the approaching Storm Darragh emptied its load over the north-west of England, video footage showed the stands and stairways of Everton’s new stadium cascading with rainwater, filling and flooding the concourses beneath.

Which – in an ideal world – is probably not the image you want people to conjure up when they think of your new £760m waterfront stadium, built on a floodplain, surrounded on three sides by the River Mersey and expected to withstand decades of climate change and devastating sea level rises.

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Welcome to the GSL T20 in Guyana where big oil, geopolitics and cricket collide | Jonathan Liew

T20 tournament has sprung up amid battle for oil and allies but do the cricketers actually know what is going on?

In 1899 an international tribunal controversially settled a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in favour of the British, and 125 years later Liam Dawson is walking back to the Providence Stadium pavilion, run out for a two-ball duck after failing to slide his bat into the crease. Obviously we’ve stripped out a little intermediate context there. But these two events, these seemingly random nodes in time, are in fact ephemerally connected.

What do you mean, you haven’t been following Hampshire’s progress in the Global Super League Twenty20 in Guyana? It’s been playing live on YouTube every night. Nick Knight and Mark Butcher are among the commentators. International stars like Moeen Ali, Carlos Brathwaite and Shan Masood are featuring. At the time of writing, meanwhile, Dawson has faced five balls in the competition, scored one run and been dismissed three times.

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Pep Guardiola left grasping at air as his once impregnable dynasty falls apart | Jonathan Liew

Manchester City’s empire has imploded at incredible speed and they were humbled further by merciless Liverpool side

Pep Guardiola kept holding up six fingers. The Liverpool fans were in delirium and the Liverpool players were jigging and jiving across the turf, and his own players had gone over to applaud the travelling support, which is really the least anyone deserves after attempting to travel across northern England on a Sunday.

Still Guardiola kept holding up six fingers: proudly, almost incredulously, as if discovering the concept of fingers for the very first time. What did it all mean? The number of defeats since they last won a game? The position in which they most desperately require reinforcements in January? The number of touches, over 90 minutes, that Erling Haaland had in the final third?

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Manchester City’s day of reckoning is coming – it may even arrive at Anfield | Jonathan Liew

An overreliance on Guardiola’s genius has sent champions down a diverging path to Slot’s revamped Liverpool

On this week’s episode of the Rest is Football podcast, the Manchester City midfielder Rodri was asked if he ever fancies emulating Pep Guardiola and becoming a coach. “No,” comes the firm response. “I see Pep, and I don’t know if I want that for the next period of my life. I see Txiki’s face and I like it more. More clean and relaxed.”

Of course Rodri has made no secret in the past of his admiration for City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, and his desire to go down that career path after he retires. All the same, there is a faintly damning quality to his words. Imagine being so hard-working, so ruthlessly dedicated to your job, that even Rodri starts to think: whoa fella, bit much.

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Why was Conor McGregor’s sinister cult of content lauded and rewarded for so long? | Jonathan Liew

It took defeat in civil case against a woman who accused him of rape for brands and fans to disown UFC fighter

Some good news at last for Conor McGregor. Probably there’s a way of spinning it as bad news, which is what the scum mainstream media will do. But in the wake of his defeat in a Dublin civil case against a woman who accused him of raping her, as brands and fans scramble to disown him, as murals are hastily painted over across the island, you have to take your pledges of support where you can find them. Step forward: Andrew Tate.

“Bullshit ruling against Conor McGregor,” Tate wrote from Romania, where he is facing his own legal issues, including charges of trafficking and rape. “Women sleep with rich men and if that man doesn’t fund their life afterwards, they lie and sue. Their brutal narcissism can’t take the L of being undesired. We’ve set a dangerous precedent. It’s literally impossible to be a man in the western world.”

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