In much the same way that one has to wait in line for a game of tennis during the first week in July, late December-early January is prime dartboard buying season. Many misguided youngsters will have, in their time, lobbied for the purchase of a dartboard, usually with other people's money. Most will now regret that decision and will be unable to look at the battered and dusty item without experiencing a flash of embarrassment.
Scoring early on in the leg doesn't matter. It will inevitably come to down that protracted battle to hit the Double 1 first
Getting down below 100 from 501 wasn't half the battle. It wasn't even a tenth of the battle. Bad darts is all about holding one's nerve and trying to hit the Double 1 in under an hour.
The wall surrounding the dart board in your house will look like a firing squad had a go at it
More crevices and bullet holes than were left on the GPO in Easter Week.
Most darts legs are the length of a snooker frame between Peter Ebdon and Graeme Dott, circa 2004
If the double 1 remained especially elusive to both players, then the leg could go on for an incredibly long time. We've seen test matches that are shorter than some darts legs.
There's a limit to what a coach can do for a darts player
In Martin Amis's novel London Fields, small time crook and aspiring darter Keith Talent gives narrator Samson Young the benefit of his darts wisdom for the sum of fifty pounds an hour.
'Our noses were still almost touching as Keith talked of such things as the address of the board and gracing the oche and the sincerity of the dart. Oh yes and clinicism. He went on to tell me everything he knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds.
There's nothing to know. And were I the kind of writer that went about improving on unkempt reality, I might have come up with something a little more complicated. But darts it is....
'My first dart hit the double 3. 'Insincere dart,' said Keith. My second missed the board altogether, smacking into the wall cabinet. 'No clinicism,' said Keith. My third I never threw: on the backswing the plastic flight jabbed me in the eye. After I'd recovered from that, my scores went 11, 2, 9; 4, 17, outer bullseye; 7, 13, 5. Around now, Keith stopped talking about the sincerity of the dart and started saying 'Throw it right for Christ sake' and 'Get the fucking thing in there'.
For the bad darts player, darts is strictly a winter game. In fact, that's overstating it. It's a late-December, early-January type of game
Ask the casual darts fan for a game in May and he'll look at you as if you've recently sprouted another head.
After a while, one abandoned darts as it is played on the telly and settled for a game of 'round the world'
A game in which one had to hit 1 to 20 in the correct order, with the first to reach the end winning. Rules varied depending on household. Some dropped little grenades into the mix for added difficulty. For instance if one failed to hit 5, 10, or 15 in three darts or under then one had to start off again at 1.
You now regard the unused dart board that is hidden away behind the coat hangers in your house as embarrassing proof that you are controlled by television
It's an absurdity that you ever persuaded someone to purchase this item.
That one time you hit 180
Usually, there'll be an asterisks surrounding this rare achievement. Either you were standing close to the board or you only had two darts at the time (having lost the other) and had to pull one of them out of the board before firing it in again.
Never ask why there are no good Irish darts players
The theory has been advanced in pub talk circles that no Irishman has won the world championship because the Irish use pubs as God intended them to use them, namely, for drinking and talking shite rather than playing games.
More learned observers contend that lack of sponsorship is what's holding back many Irish players.
If you were born in the mid-to-late 1980s, you were probably taken in by BBC propaganda
For five years, you watched the BBC coverage of the Embassy World Darts Championship under the false impression that you were watching the world's best darts players.
