Oh darts, where is thy sting? Littler heads to Hyde Park

It’s not just Sabrina Carpenter and Stevie Wonder appearing in Hyde Park this summer, you know. As freshly announced, Luke Littler, Luke Humphries, Fallon Sherrock and Michael van Gerwen will be strutting the fabled Oak Stage on a night of elite darts exhibition action with special guests.

No doubt the purists will be looking askance at this, detecting gargantuan over-reach and arguing that, if God had meant Luke Littler to be playing Hyde Park (capacity, 65,000), He wouldn’t have created Alexandra Palace.

Fair point. At the same time, having completed its unlikely journey from the sticky pub circuit to the nation’s glossiest Enormodomes (the PDC’s Premier League now annually stops at the likes of Glasgow’s OVO Hydro and Nottingham’s Motorpoint Arena before ­concluding at London’s O2), where else was left for darts to go?

Indeed, it’s possible that this first tentative incursion into the summer festival season is merely a trial balloon for an eventual tilt at the big one – Glastonbury.

Littler facing van Gerwen  as a Saturday-night headliner with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor revisiting old glories slightly stiffly in the Sunday afternoon Legends slot?  At this rate...

In the meantime, let’s give due weight to the possibility that some of the game’s nuances will be lost on 8 July in the 500 metres or so between the stage and the Thai food trucks.

Then again, that’s what the big screens are for. And at least one can anticipate with unalloyed relish the prospect of the fancy-dressed darts crowd – happy to come as ketchup bottles or precariously astride foam dragons – at festival scale.

Moreover, even now, in the age of the £1 million prize pot and the raging walk-on, darts remains unshakeably down-to-earth. In grassy Hyde Park, finally in touch with the elements, perhaps it can be fully so.

One possible problem, though: those elements. These days the tiresome old question of whether darts is a sport can be dealt with very swiftly: it is. Whether darts is an outdoor sport, on the other hand... well, here perhaps discussions continue. One thinks back anxiously to the rare moments when Alexandra Palace, sealed tight at Christmas for the PDC World Championships, has been obliged to admit nature, either literally or even as a concept.

Wind, of course, is darting kryptonite. In 2012, James Wade and Adrian Lewis had to leave the Ally Pally oche for 30 minutes while the source of a ruinous draught was located and nullified. Playing into a stiff breeze for the whole of the second half made little difference to Taylor Swift in Hyde Park in 2015; it’s a potential career-ender for Michael van Gerwen.

And then what about insects? Lewis was stung by a wasp at Ally Pally in 2012. In the same venue this January, the same wasp, or a close relative, menaced Shaun Murphy during the snooker Masters, just two years after settling worryingly on the groin of Mark Williams, who was sent scurrying around the table.

From which we can quickly conclude that the wasp is no friend to sport, nor to anything else, really, not even other wasps. And if Ally Pally in winter has a wasp problem, then it’s hardly going out on a limb to suggest that Hyde Park in summer most likely has a bigger one.

And we haven’t even mentioned pollen. Nor pigeons. Nor rain, or even just a heavy dew treacherously dampening the oche as the shadows lengthen. Frankly, this one night in July, far from an actual walk in the park, could be the biggest test that darts has ever faced. The entire future of the sport could open up gloriously in a balmy evening of darting excellence and a set from Olly Murs or perish in a couple of ill-timed gusts and the arrival of an unwanted gnat.

Either way, though, who wouldn’t want to see it? Tickets go on sale this Friday.

Incidentally, also on the bill that night is Dion Dublin. One assumes the former Aston Villa striker has been engaged in an MC capacity, or perhaps to offer a musical interlude. (Dublin, you’ll remember, is one of a vanishingly  small number of footballers to have represented England and patented his own percussion instrument.)

Unless, of course, Dublin is on board to reprise his long-standing role in some kind of stage-adaptation of the daytime TV staple Homes Under the Hammer. But that wouldn’t make any sense, would it? Homes Under the Hammer really isn’t an outdoor sport and surely never can be.

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