Sherrock’s synthetic success over Littler and why Netflix’s darts special felt so dissatisfying

Decades of professionalism, investment and industrialised training methods have rendered the gulf between the sporting gods and mortals virtually unbridgeable

“She walked in here a hairdresser from Milton Keynes – and walks out £501,000 richer!” Gary Lineker announced at the conclusion of Netflix’s Beat Luke Littler on Friday night. Which, while strictly accurate as a description of the winner Fallon Sherrock, arguably fell some way short of providing the full picture. “She walked in wearing socks – and walks out £501,000 richer!” “She walked in here a vertebrate mammal – and walks out £501,000 richer!” I mean, if we’re just reciting facts without context here.

Because while Sherrock may still theoretically be qualified to cut hair, much of her past decade has been spent on darts: playing darts, practising darts, travelling to and from darts, promoting her darts career. Though she may never have held a Professional Darts Corporation tour card, she is – by any sane definition of the term – a professional darts player. Indeed, as a result of her historic run to the third round of the world championship at Alexandra Palace in late 2019, she may still be the second most famous darts player in the country, after Littler himself.

All of which ensured that the double-top Sherrock hit to beat a flagging Littler and end the competition also marked the start of a feverish and fraught discussion over what, exactly, we had just been watching. A show billed explicitly as “20 amateur players” taking on the world champion over a single leg of darts, in which members of the public were invited to apply and queue and audition, had ultimately been won by a player who will appear next month at her 13th world championship.

Another of the contestants on Friday night, the 15‑year‑old prodigy Mitchell Lawrie, is by common consent the best junior player in the world and well capable of beating Littler over a longer format. Sherrock and Lawrie followed the rules, filled out the form, queued up like everyone else. So was this a genuine meritocratic sporting competition? Or a confected, curated primetime game show?

This matters, and not merely for the reason that sporting prize money is taxed while television game show windfalls are not. Across the sporting landscape, from influencer boxing to Baller League to six-figure bonuses for Olympic athletes, what was once a rigid divide has become increasingly porous. Where does the amateur realm end and the professional realm begin? And to what extent is it even meaningful to draw a distinction between the two?

“I don’t think she should have been selected to play,” the former world champion Mark Webster complained, while also making it clear that no blame should be attached to Sherrock herself. And much of the criticism of the event, beforehand and afterwards, was trained on Netflix for its verbal sleight of hand, selling the event as a golden rags-to-riches opportunity, even filming the promos in a working men’s club, intentionally evoking the spectre of some no-name pub player defenestrating the greatest dartist on earth.

At which point it is probably worth tightening up some of the terminology here. Let’s start, by way of example, with “pub player”. Which in reality encompasses an entire spectrum of ability: from the lad with the sideburns 14 pints deep who can barely see past the point of his dart, to elite pros such as Chris Dobey or Jonny Clayton or Stephen Bunting, who will often still turn out for their local league or Super League team when a punishing schedule allows. So, in terms of averages, we’re talking everything from 100 down to about four. Not that useful.

And perhaps it is the down-to-earth accessibility of darts that renders it one of the last remaining sports still beguiled by the idea that an amateur can literally step up off the street and take down a world champion. In what other sport would “Beat Luke Littler” even fly as an idea? “Knock Out Oleksandr Usyk”, in which amateur pugilists are given three minutes to land a devastating blow on the undefeated world champion. “Out-Vault Simone Biles”: which member of the public will successfully nail the Yurchenko double pike?

(For all this, I would be heartily in the market for a show called “Dismiss Marnus Labuschagne”, in which the floundering Australia No 3 is served up a diet of progressively incompetent amateur bowling in an attempt to find out whether there is a point at which he finally loses his Test spot.)

The issue, of course, is that decades of professionalism, investment, industrialised training methods and best practice have rendered the gulf between the gods and the mortals virtually unbridgeable. Your average professional tennis player may as well be a different species to the doubles champion down your local club. Fleetwood Town’s victory against Arsenal in the League Cup last week may have felt outlandish, impossible, an otherworldly triumph for the little guy and, narratively, it was, but all the same this was a team of paid footballers most of whom had come through the ranks at Premier League clubs, and had far more in common with the polyglot millionaires they were facing than they ever will with the likes of you or me.

And, of course, darts has gone on this journey too in recent years: the coaching, the academies, the dramatic stratification of talent. To the point where the very concept of Beat Luke Littler actually felt vaguely insulting, a wilful diminution of the dedication and craft and skill and guts and stagecraft required to play this sport to a high level in front of a baying crowd. “Do you want just a series of 20 matches where someone can’t even throw a dart?” the PDC president, Barry Hearn, argued afterwards. “No, we want excellence competing against excellence.”

You can have excellence against excellence, or you can have amateur against professional, but you can’t have both. Perhaps this was why Netflix’s streamed product felt so dissatisfying: a kind of synthetic sport substitute, sport pretending not to be sport, sport paid by the view, the invocation of amateur ideals when the reality was no such thing. Of course you can’t blame Sherrock for grasping the opportunity with both hands, in the same way you can’t blame Littler for merrily playing along, in the same way you can’t really blame a global streaming giant for wanting a piece of one of this country’s fastest-growing sports, in the same way you can’t really blame the columnist for writing about it. We are all playing for money now, and in this sense at least we are all ultimate professionals.