A game with probably more players, and certainly a smaller proportion of
non-playing spectators, than any other English sport will produce a new national champion tomorrow. The finals will be decided at the perhaps inevitable Wembley, in a blaze of light and with the assistance of ten thousand onlookers, though it might better suit the traditions of the game, and perhaps the nerves of some of the competitors, could the eight finalists be smuggled off to a country inn and have it out in the quiet corner of a low-roofed taproom. The fun must have started in a great many such places, for the chosen eight have worked their way to Wembley through a total entry of 289,864 competitors, scoring their trebles and "tons" and the triumphant final double in more familiar surroundings and no doubt to a chorus of well-practised local approbation. None of them is exactly a lad at the game, for their average age is not far short of forty; they have probably worn out many a bristled board between them. Darts was never a game where age defers to youth and in many a country tavern you may see the trebles come thick and fast when the old man in the corner is brought in
to strengthen a match.
The unskilled dabbler in the art who will wager a foregone pint of mild to get into the fringes of a village game perhaps sees darts at its best. He will sometimes find it hard to credit that any townsmen's team could better the skill of the countryman he has been lucky to pick up as a partner. Perhaps the series of county and district contests which lead to Wembley
less readily attracts the village than the town. Certainly the towns are on top in this year's national tournament. Miners and ex-miners, metal workers, and a bus builder are in the list for Wembley, though two labourers, from Spalding, in Lincolnshire, and Crotton, near Wakefield, suggest that rural skill will also be seen. West Hartlepool and St. Helens will represent the North and Southall and Stroud the South; from Monmouthshire comes a Blaenavon miner.
What appears to be missing, and what will plobably keep the affair out of the headlines, is any sort of a foreign "menace." No Von Nida or Walter Hagen has yet appeared in the darts world, nor anything out of a French stable. If St Helens goes down it will only be to Gloucestershire or Durham and no cups will go irrecoverably abroad. It may be that America and Australia have not yet fallen in any big way for the double-ringed board and the subtractive joys of "301-up." If we really wanted any more competition from overseas, it might have been as well to postpone tomorrow's finals until the Olympic visitors arrive; to give them a demonstration and send them home with the new idea. Not that there is much to be made out of a game in which there would be few "pros" who could survive against all comers and where the "shamateur" is still unknown. Darts is so much more a game to play than to watch; and are not the spectators responsible for most of the hullabaloo attaching to more "organised" sports?
[The 1948 darts champion was Harry Leadbetter from the Windle Labour Club, St Helens, who triumphed over Tommy Small of the Sth Durham Steel & Iron SC, West Hartlepool]
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
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