Michael van Gerwen secured his first televised title in two years with victory over defending champion Luke Littler in the World Series of Darts final.<\/b><\/p>\n
The Dutchman, who had not win a TV title since 2023, beat Littler 11-7 in front of a partisan home crowd in Amsterdam to lift the trophy for a sixth time.<\/p>\n
“We all know what difficulties I’ve had in the last few months, but to do it in front of my home crowd means a lot to me, it’s amazing,” Van Gerwen told ITV Sport.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never been away, but I’ve had to dig really deep to do this. I love what I do. I hope this is the beginning of a lot more.”<\/p>\n
Van Gerwen began well and had three 180s in the opening five legs to lead 3-2 at the first interval.<\/p>\n
Littler levelled straight after the resumption, but Van Gerwen rattled off three straight legs to move back in front.<\/p>\n
The key moment of the match came when Littler missed darts to make it 7-7, with Van Gerwen instead taking the leg before then moving 9-6 in front.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old sealed the win with a fine 130 checkout, ending with an average of 98.37.<\/p>\n
Van Gerwen had earlier beaten Josh Rock 11-6 in the semi-finals, while Littler fought back from 9-5 down to beat Gerwyn Price 11-10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael van Gerwen secured his first televised title in two years with victory over defending champion Luke Littler…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-425193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115205992853148701","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}