Key events
Luke Littler’s route to the final
With the exception of a marvellous match against Rob Cross, when he became embroiled with the crowd as well as an inspired opponent, Littler has strolled to the final, losing only three of his 28 sets.
It helped that a number of seeds fell by the wayside: he could have played Gerwyn Price in the quarter-final and Stephen Bunting in the semis. But let’s be honest, he’d probably have beaten them anyway.
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First round Darius Labanauskas 3-0 (avg 101.54)
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Second round David Davies 3-0 (97.15)
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Third round Mensur Suljovic 4-0 (107.09)
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Fourth round Rob Cross 4-2 (106.58)
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Quarter-final Krzysztof Ratajski 5-0 (100.04)
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Semi-final Ryan Searle 6-1 (105.35)
Preamble
It’s a story as old as time: an undisputed champion breaks the spirit of allcomers until a brilliant young talent emerges to offer a new and formidable challenge. That’s the set up for tonight’s PDC World Championship final at Alexandra Palace, where the world champion Luke Littler meets the world youth champion Gian van Veen.
The twist is that the world champion is five years younger than the world youth champion. That’s because Littler took the greatest shortcut in darts history by winning the world title at the age of 17; now he is aiming to become the first person since Gary Anderson a decade ago to retain the Sid Waddell Trophy.
Littler, an 18-year-old veteran, and Van Veen have a combined age of 41, making this easily the youngest world championship final. It’s barely two years since they met in the world youth championship final at Minehead, a thrilling game that Littler won 6-4. Van Veen has been the world youth champion in the last two years. He didn’t beat Littler in either of those tournaments but did have the better of their five contests in 2025: Littler 2-3 Van Veen. He won’t be intimidated tonight, not even when Littler goes into beast mode.
Everyone knew how good Van Veen was, yet he went into this year’s competition having never won a match at Ally Pally. While Littler reached the final on his first two appearances, and won the thing last year, Van Veen lost to Man Lok Leung and Ricardo Pietreczko.
Now they are in the final together. A year or two earlier than expected, perhaps, but it was always going to be like this.
The players will be on stage at 8.15pm GMT.
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