‘I practise for 20 minutes a day, maybe half an hour’: Darts prodigy and footballers’ friend LUKE LITTLER, 17, reveals his minimalist training regime (and his beloved Xbox) that shot him to overnight stardom

An atypical teenager reviews the components of a typical day in his life. As a recipe for sporting brilliance, the routine is quite similar to Luke Littler’s own: unique and quite surprising.

He begins his description with his nights, which mimic his afternoons, and combined they offer an intriguing portrait of Dart as a young man. You might also consider this: If he’s so good with darts, one can only imagine how effective he must be with a video game controller.

“I don’t know why, but I’m always up until 2 or 3 in the morning on my Xbox,” Littler says. sport mailand it is not worth telling at this point, before going into details, that he is a boy who turned 17 only three weeks ago.

Or put another way, he is a prodigy who reached the final of the World Championship last month at the age of 16 and fifteen days later won his first professional title after 10 minutes of practice. We’d barely heard of him eight weeks ago and today he has 1.1 million Instagram followers, £220,000 in prize money and was recently granted a private audience with Sir Alex Ferguson.

But let’s return to that regime to see how it has been constructed.

“I wake up at 1 or 2 p.m. and do the same thing every day,” he says. “Maybe I need to get into the routine of going to bed at a normal time; I never see the morning.” I get up, I use my Xbox, when I get bored, I go to the practice board, and when I get bored, I go back to my Xbox.’

And that practice? What does it look like in a capricious, nuanced game in which Phil Taylor, the 16-time world champion, would spend more than 10 hours a day in his garage to keep up? “Maybe 20 minutes or half an hour,” he says. “Just to keep my arm loose.”

It is truly extraordinary. He is baffling, brilliant and open to all kinds of misinterpretation, as sporting geniuses tend to be.

For Littler, his daily activities are “a lot of the things a 17-year-old would do,” and that’s right about some of them. But the rest is the stuff of a phenomenon. From a Warrington lad who doesn’t seem to waste many thoughts on why it all works, just enough to know that when he wants a dart to go somewhere, he usually does. We’ll come back to that because it’s fascinating.

For now, the result of his gifts has been extraordinary, both in his success and in the attention he has brought to Littler, the new face of a sport that has never before generated this level of interest.

He has pushed those boundaries: his World Championship final defeat against Luke Humphries was watched on Sky by 4.8 million people, the largest non-football audience in the broadcaster’s history, eclipsing the Ryder Cup and Ashes.

By then, darts had already left behind its condescending and old-fashioned reputation as a pub game, but Littler has completely crossed over into new places.

A couple of weeks ago that extended to an invitation to meet the Manchester United team, where he faced Harry Maguire and Christian Eriksen in a challenge. After Maguire set a target of 171 with nine darts, Littler hit a 180 with his first three and the game was over.

“To be honest, it was good to get out of the house,” he adds, and that’s just the deadpan delivery of a lad who left school with a GCSE, has magic in his hands and has found the entire business in his name. a little disconcerting.

“I support United, so it was a pleasure to meet my idols at my club,” he added. ‘It was a good day. I watched them train for a while but it was raining and I went in when they started doing tactics and all that.

‘I also met Sir Alex at United-Spurs a few weeks ago. That was good. My dad had seen his glory years, he witnessed ’99, and that’s why it was good for him to meet him. It was good to chat. I didn’t get much out of it because of his accent, but he told me to go ahead and stick with it.’

That experience, and the broader look at him since that World Championships at Alexandra Palace, has been “insane,” as Littler describes it. He’s mostly comfortable – “the more I win, the more attention I get, so I move on” – but he’s also been a bit stifling. He tells a story about his week-long break in Wales after the World Cup that backs up this point.

“I was in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t even tell you where, and they recognized me outside Asda,” he says. ‘As soon as I walked in, someone wanted a photo. I had to go and sit in the car!’

Humphries, the world champion and a good guy, has started keeping an eye on the boy he beat at the Palace. “We should take care of it,” he said. sport mail last week. “She’s handled it very well, but it’s a lot.”

Comparisons to Emma Raducanu are fair to some extent, if not necessarily because of the magnitude of her relative achievements and focus (Raducanu’s experiences surpassed Littler’s on both counts), but because of the cautionary notes of how quickly she can go south in sport. If that’s a concern for Littler, she effectively hides it.

In reality, he doesn’t seem to care much: “The truth is that I haven’t investigated anything like that.”

Are you familiar with its history? ‘Not precisely.’

You have to laugh at that. Just as you have to warm up to their indifference to the commotion.

So far, his sporting performances can be traced on a sharp, upward curve: after the World Championship final, Littler beat Humphries and threw nine darts to win a title in Bahrain, having practiced for 10 minutes at the end of his week off. . He then reached another final a week later in Holland and has since beaten Humphries twice more in his Premier Darts League debut.

Even if we can safely assume that interest will wane, that the novelty will wear off, there is no current evidence to suggest that his game won’t go all the way.

Which brings us back to the topic of how he has sculpted a talent that was always obvious, going back to a time when he was a child entering under-21 teams and even a teenager cleaning up world youth titles.

“I’ve always been good at the game,” he says. ‘I started in pub leagues when I was about 10 and before that I was at St Helens Dart Academy, every Monday from 6pm to 10pm I guess people noticed me. He hit the adults and sometimes there was a reaction.

“I think the most important thing was that when we first went into lockdown (in 2020), I was doing four or five hours a day because there was nothing else to do.”

What follows is as close to a perfect description of raw sports gifts as you can find in short answers.

“Now it’s maybe 20 minutes or half an hour,” he says. “Because I have my talent, I don’t need to do stupid hours again.” In an aside he will add: “The hard work paid off and I don’t need to put in any more effort.”

It’s very different from people like Taylor, but it also sounds like Ronnie O’Sullivan, who said sport mail last year that he regrets having modified his game and getting carried away by technical obsessions.

If he had his time again, O’Sullivan said he would still be the 14-year-old boy who played by instinct and feel and would stay in that space for as long as he could. At 17 years old, Littler is in that zone, where if it works, it works, and if it works, why change it?

“I don’t even remember the last time I was nervous,” he says, without boasting. It’s just him.

Some bored souls might mistake it for complacency. Others would see it as genius and have Littler’s results on their side of the argument.