New Year starter for ten: who said this? ‘When you hear people on TV talking about you in the same breath as people like Steven Gerrard or Freddie Flintoff, you look at it as if they’re talking about someone else. It’s weird. It’s very humbling and gives you a lump in your throat.’ No, not some brand new novice champion, but the great and charmingly self-effacing Phil Taylor, after winning his 15th World Darts Championship in breathtaking style.
Someone should give The Power a deal puffing ludicrously expensive watches, or standing in for Thierry or Tiger as one of Gillette’s poster boys, earning squillions. It’s 20 years since he took his first world darts title and with the latest he banked well over £200 grand, as he shyly, but with evident pleasure, told Radio 5. And why not? And for those who say that the art of the oche doesn’t constitute a sport, I refer to the wisdom of legendary commentator Sid Waddell, who once declared Taylor to be ‘a better all-round athlete than Ryan Giggs’. Take that, Sports Personality of the Year.
With darts, as long as you can count, you know exactly what’s going on, which is more than can be said for rugby union, currently going through yet another of its increasingly frequent bouts of soul-searching. The trigger this time was a savage mauling for the ref and the rules by Saracens’ South African director of rugby Brendan Venter. Whether Venter should have laid into the ref after his side’s 15-22 defeat by Leicester is one thing, but what is obvious to most people who love the game is that for long periods of a match we haven’t got a clue what’s happening.
I could watch rugby till the cows come home, but for the life of me, if anyone asked what most penalties were for, I don’t think I could answer with any certainty more than once or twice a game.
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