Littler himself summed up the final when he told Sky Sports after the match: “I have no idea how I’ve done that.”<\/p>\n
In his own words, he was “gone” with Price 5-0 up and allowing Littler to have just one double attempt, in the opening leg, such was his scoring dominance.<\/p>\n
Littler did avoid the whitewash, with an ironic celebration showing he felt it was nothing more than a consolation. But Price then missed three match darts in the next leg, which seemed to destroy his confidence.<\/p>\n
And while Littler was freewheeling with nothing to lose, the 41-year-old tightened up with two more missed match darts as the impossible turned to the improbable, and eventually the inevitable, as Littler pinched a memorable success.<\/p>\n
“It was very strange,” he admitted. “The first leg was a bit of fun, got my 180 and then waved them goodbye because when Gerwyn Price is on double tops he doesn’t usually miss.<\/p>\n
“I was so gone. I might as well as have been off stage, but this is darts, things happen. Darts is a silly old game.”<\/p>\n
Littler finished with a 95.54 average in the final with four 180s and a 50% checkout rate in the end – but the stats hardly tell any of the story as Price went away kicking himself and Littler walking off with the trophy still in a state of disbelief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Littler himself summed up the final when he told Sky Sports after the match: “I have no idea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-837329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116258832736996343","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837329","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=837329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}