Jonathan Liew: without Phil 'The Power' Taylor, the PDC World Championship title fight becomes a load of Bull

Jonathan Liew: without Phil 'The Power' Taylor, the PDC World Championship title fight becomes a load of Bull

Like perfume adverts on television and most forms of public dancing, sport is the kind of thing that is heavily wedded to its context.

Looking lost: Phil Taylor suffers a rare defeat Photo: ACTION IMAGES

By Jonathan Liew 8:00AM GMT 03 Jan 2011

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Like perfume adverts on television and most forms of public dancing, sport is the kind of thing that is heavily wedded to its context. If you think about it, very few sports have any kind of intrinsic appeal, as will regularly be made clear if you live with a sporting agnostic. Why do those men just walk around trying to hit the ball into a hole? Why do those two guys just stand there in red gloves and punch each other? Who cares which horse can run faster than all the others? And so on.

And so we attempt to weave a cogent narrative around all these fairly esoteric pursuits in a frantic attempt to imbue them with meaning. We hand out shiny metal cups and trophies, engineer drama, feuds and tension, anoint protagonists and antagonists, paint heroes to exalt and scoundrels to deride. Sport becomes an artifice for which the humdrum calculation of points and goals is but a handy surrogate.

The problem for any sport comes when its well of narrative threatens to run dry. Snooker ran into all its recent difficulties when it stopped producing arresting characters such as Alex Higgins and Jimmy White, and we realised that watching two men in waistcoats pot balls for two days was not quite as exciting as it once was.

Many of cricket’s current ills stem from the fact that its ceaseless treadmill of hollow one-day games allows no room for the game and its players to breathe. Athletics was facing a similar problem until Usain Bolt dragged us wide-eyed and incredulous from our seats.

Darts is one of those sports that is sustained by its context. Strip away the pounding music, the bright lights and the vigorous fans with their colourful placards, and on an aesthetic level you may as well be watching two fat men throwing screwed-up balls of paper into a distant dustbin. It is the artifice that makes darts the spectacle it is, not that it is any the less entertaining for that.

But this week, darts has been granted a glimpse into its possible future, and it may not necessarily like what it sees. Somehow, for only the fourth time in 17 years, Phil Taylor lost at the PDC World Championship. Not only did Taylor lose, but so did Raymond van Barneveld. So did James Wade, Simon Whitlock and Mervyn King. By the time it had reached the quarter-final stage, the game’s showpiece event had lost its most recognised characters.

What does that leave us with? Well, the last four consisted of Adrian ‘Jackpot’ Lewis, Mark ‘Webby’ Webster, Gary ‘Gary’ Anderson and Terry Jenkins, nicknamed ‘The Bull’ for reasons that appear solely attributable to the fact that he looks a little bit like a bull. Not too many household names in that lot, you’ll notice. And therein lies the crisis facing darts.

More than virtually any other sport in this country, the fortunes of darts are tied up in one man. Once again, Sky will get record viewing figures for this year’s championship, but how many of those were lured over on the basis of Taylor’s high-profile appearance on Sports Personality of the Year? And how many of those will have remained to watch ‘The Bull’ against ‘Gary’ last night?

In the absence of Taylor and most of the game’s other stars, the BDO championship has been marginalised into irrelevance, the kind of thing you put on television on a Sunday afternoon and then forget about while you do household chores. Taylor leads the bulletins, and Taylor sells the tickets.

Before his game against Webster on Saturday night, Sky ran an extensive preview feature on Taylor in which he was filmed in a series of moody poses on the balcony of a London apartment while wearing a trendy flat cap, before being interviewed by Eric Bristow. Darts has been clinging to the coat-tails of Taylor’s phenomenal talent for two decades. The prospect that it may now be on the wane has grave consequences for both.

The PDC’s challenge is to construct a viable post-Taylor future. “The Power is out!” John Gwynne roared as Taylor was eliminated. It remains to be seen whether any of his successors can generate enough electricity to keep the show on the road. Perhaps they could start by giving the players some decent nicknames.

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