The “child prodigy” is about to make a big splash. 16-year-old Luke Littler has reached the final of the Darts World Cup with another strong performance and will meet his English compatriot Luke Humphries, who won his semi-final 6-0.
In the semi-finals in London’s “Ally Pally” on Tuesday (January 2nd, 2024), Littler beat former world champion Rob Cross 6-2 in sets. This means that the junior world champion is in the final of his first World Cup participation among the seniors. “I have no words. This is just crazy,” Littler told English TV channel Sky Sports.
With a throw on his “favorite double 10”, Littler converted his first match dart and could bring the great fairy tale to a happy ending. The youngest world title holder from the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) is the Dutchman Michael van Gerwen, who triumphed for the first time in London in 2014 at the age of 24.
Littler improves from sentence to sentence
Luke “The Nuke” Littler, who scored 180 points in 16 shots, only had occasional wobbles – which then became less and less the longer the match went on.
From an average score of 97 for three throws in the first two sets, the teenager threw himself up to an average of a strong 106 points in the end. In the end Cross, who had become the first player to turn around a 0-4 set deficit at a World Cup in the quarter-finals the day before, had no chance.
Show of force by Humphries
On Wednesday Littler will face Luke Humphries. The new world number one made short work of the unseeded Scott Williams in the second semi-final and won 6-0 sets. Humphries, who narrowly beat German hope Ricardo Pietreczko in the third round, never left any doubts.
He threw 180 14 times, had a shooting average of 108 and converted 60 percent of his checkout throws. After just under an hour of play, Humphries made his first ever World Cup final appearance perfect with this performance. The 28-year-old had recently won three major tournaments in a row and is the favorite going into the final at London’s Alexandra Palace.
