Mine's a double (top): How I got "Ally Pally" with the beer-swilling hordes at the World Darts

In the spirit: A darts fan enjoys himself at Alexandra Palace
Tim Cooper30 December 2016

I’m sitting next to Spiderman who’s pacing up and down looking anxiously at his watch before muttering “Outrageous!” and storming off with two huge pitchers of beer.

Beside him on the bench is Superman who’s eyeing the German sausage stall where a busty Bavarian barmaid with blonde pigtails and her lederhosen-clad boyfriend are wondering whether to go for the bratwurst or the currywurst. Not to be confused with the real Bavarians, who are smartly co-ordinated in blazers of Bavarian blue and white, or the Irishmen in matching green suits and hats, or the Mexicans in ponchos and sombrerors. Or the monks, the penguins, the Trumps – a new arrival this year - or the Oompah Loompahs, one of whom is having a spot of trouble attaching his eyebrow. Many of them are German and Dutch (although few, if any, are Mexican) and all of them are drinking beer as if it’s Oktoberfest in Munich and the bars are about to close for another year.

This is the World Darts Championship at Ally Pally. For many of us, darts was something that happened in pubs in the 1970s and occasionally on television, when fat men in terrible shirts stood on something called an “oche”, drinking and smoking too much and throwing ‘arrers at a board eight feet away, while a man with a loud voice marked a maximum score by booming out “One hundred and EIGHTY!”.

It was as much a part of TV sport as racing (horses and greyhounds, rally cars and speedway bikes) and wrestling and snooker, and it was so popular that it generated its own comedy sketch.

Decades later it’s still here, it’s still on the telly, and it’s undergone a radical overhaul, thanks to the arrival of overseas players, an injection of razzmatazz in the shape of loud music, scantily-clad cheerleaders and elaborate fancy dress, and a move from the Circus Tavern in Purfleet to Alexandra Palace at Christmas. It’s no longer the sole preserve of the working classes: these days you’re as likely to run into lawyers and bankers as builders and plumbers. And this is its apotheosis. For a new generation of darts lovers, who bought the tickets way back in July, the annual World Darts Championship is as much a part of Christmas as turkey and fir trees, but with ridiculous costumes and beer. Lots and lots of beer.

Dick Dastardly enjoys the atmosphere at Ally Pally

It’s extraordinary how much is being bought and almost as extraordinary how loud the audience are, but not quite because the two things are obviously connected. You could probably measure it scientifically if you could come up with an algorithm that measures the volume of beer drunk against the actual volume of the drinkers after they’ve drunk it. It was noisy when I got here shortly before 1 o’clock and it rose as soon as the scantily clad cheerleaders appeared and young German hope Max ‘The Maximiser’ Hopp strode onto the stage to the sound of his signature tune ‘No Limit’, with the hundreds of Germans in the crowd adapting the lyric (‘Ya-ya, Ya-ya-ya-ya, Ya-ya-ya-ya, Ya-ya THERE’S NO LIMIT’) at ear-splitting volume, followed by his Belgian opponent Kim Huybrechts, arms aloft, touching palms, kissing his wife in the VIP section, as everyone sings along to ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’.

Fans hail a triple top during the darts at the Ally Pally

It gets louder all the time and by the end of the evening session, when Raymond ‘Barney’ van Barneveld pulls off a shock win against world number 5 Adrian ‘Jackpot’ Lewis in by far the best match of the day – the only match where you couldn’t pick a winner at the start - you need ear plugs. In fact, I notice quite early on that Kim Huybrechts is already wearing them in the first match of the day. He quickly and ruthlessly whitewashes Max Hopp, which is a shame for the 7,000 noisy Germans who’ve come over for the tournament to support the 20-year-old former European youth champion who has almost single-handedly converted the Germans into a nation of dart lovers. Before long, you imagine, they’ll be taking our home-grown champions – Gary Anderson (aka ‘The Flying Scotsman’), Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor and the aforementioned Adrian Lewis – to sudden-death play offs and breaking British hearts when our boys eventually miss the target. It’s what we do.

A group of German fans join in the fun in north London

The German fans are not exactly reticent when it comes to nailing their colours to the mast (almost literally, in the case of the blue-and-white-blazered Bavarians) but their enthusiasm will be undimmed by Hopp’s defeat. The beautiful thing about darts is that although its fans bear many superficial similarities to football fans – a preponderance of large white men who enjoy drinking beer and singing songs while dressed up in colourful costumes – they are almost entirely non-tribal. There’s none of the nastiness that comes with football, none of the club-based rivalries that colour conversations about football, none of the sneering schadenfreude when your favoured darts player wins, and none of the rage when he loses (though that may be helped by the impossibility of being defeated by an errant linesman’s flag, a dodgy penalty or a controversial red card). In fact, it turns out that in the small print of the tickets, it asks people specifically not to wear any football colours. And when someone starts singing “Stand Up If You Love The Darts” in the middle of a match, everyone stands up and joins in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the players playing at the time – James ‘The Machine’ Wade and Steve ‘The Bronzed Adonis’ Beaton, who used to sport a magnificent mullet – hadn’t put down their darts and joined in too.

Fans get set for a day out ion fancy dress at Ally Pally

The audience is happy whoever’s playing, just so long as the bar doesn’t run out of beer. I meet some Austrians and ask them if they have any fellow countrymen in the tournament “Mensur Suljović,” they say. It turns out he is the world number 8, he played yesterday and he lost. But the fans don’t mind a bit. They raise their glasses of beer and disappear happily back into the auditorium to watch someone else instead. Their neighbours the Germans have taken to darts like football fans to lager following Max Hopp’s arrival on the scene. “Darts is getting massive in Germany,” says Max in the press room after his disappointing defeat in front of a partisan crowd. “It’s like football. German people like to go out and have a few drinks while watching a game.” He says the audience was so noisy during his match that it was like being back home in Germany. “The atmosphere was amazing. The crowd was like an extra man for me. But I lost entirely because of myself – because I missed my opportunities”.

Max is the future of darts: he’s slim, good-looking and doesn’t blame anyone but himself for his defeat; he even brings his young stepson to his press conference. For all I know, Max may not even smoke or drink, which would have been unheard of in the old days of John Lowe or the unfortunate Eric ‘The Crafty Cockney’ Bristow, who can’t be with us – well the Sky commentary crew – today, or any time soon, on account of an ill-advised intervention in the recent football abuse scandal, tweeting that footballers who had been abused by youth coaches were “wimps” and suggesting they should go and “sort out” those “poofs” once they had grown up. I don’t wish to add to Bristow’s misery, because he’s always been at least one triple short of a 180, but I think it’s fair to say matters did not improve with his economically worded apology: “Sorry meant paedo not poof”.

But let’s not get bogged down in unsavoury incidents like that because darts is the people’s game – some will even argue that it’s a sport – and that’s something football has been in danger of losing, with its all-seater stadiums and alcohol bans and £80 seats and corporate hospitality and what Roy Keane called “the prawn sandwich brigade”. Darts may have had to hide the smoking and drinking behind the scenes, but only for the players. Everyone else is happy to party like it’s 1999. My abiding image of the World Darts Championship will be of sad Spiderman’s temper tantrum, and of walking out of Ally Pally to see a velvet-suited Austin Powers careering down a grass bank in the dark and narrowly avoiding a collision with another man grappling unsuccessfully with the mechanics of a pair of lederhosen in his hurry to urinate against a tree.

You don’t get that at Lord’s or Wimbledon.

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