At around 7pm on tonight, Emma Paton will be awaiting the cue from her producer that Sky Sports are live with coverage of the World Darts Championship for her sixth tournament.
Surrounded by her punditry team, drunken fans and a load of cameras, the Alexandra Palace studio will feel like home. A home that has brought her so much, yet likely still has plenty to deliver.
‘I am so excited,’ she tells Daily Mail Sport, beaming at the thought of the return of World Championship darts. ‘I can’t believe it’s come around so quick to be honest with you. The draw always gets you in the spirit for Dartsmas, which is what we have been calling it these days.’
The first night will come 342 days after teenage sensation Luke Littler became world champion. The Nuke, now 18, has transformed darts – the audience is getting bigger, tickets are getting rarer, are viewing figures are getting higher.
Paton feels lucky to have been on that ride. She was presenting the sport before Littler could even think about being a professional, but its popularity has coincided with her own.
‘Darts has massively changed my life,’ she says, refusing to accept the idea that she could be the face of darts coverage. ‘We’ll take that,’ she jokes.
‘I have been at Sky for 13 years, and over half of that was spent working on a production team on the early breakfast show Good Morning Sports Fans. I then got an opportunity to present, which is what I was working towards all that time – if felt like it would never come, really – I got in front of the camera, working on Sky Sports News, and then an opportunity came around with the darts.
‘It was at a time darts was certainly on the up. It was on the back of Fallon Sherrock winning a couple of matches on the World Championship stage, so it felt like it was certainly heading in the right direction and on this upwards trajectory. But of course, with Littler doing what he did at the Worlds a couple of years ago with the fairytale run to the final, it feels like it has exploded, so I am just lucky really to have been part of a sport that is growing and growing.’
There are 37 sessions of darts across 19 days penned in for this year’s tournament – with every single one broadcast on Sky Sports – and 128 players battling it out for the crown.
It would be impossible for one person to present every session – Paton was flanked by Anna Woolhouse last year – but she will be there for the big sessions in the evening, ready to take viewers through the action.
‘If I am typically presenting the evening session, I’ll wake up late, try and do some training maybe, then eat something,’ she says of a day in her life during the Worlds. ‘Then go through the show for the night.
‘I’ll do my prep, which will take about an hour-and-a-half to two hours, check who is playing and consolidate all the notes I have done before the tournament. Then get into work probably around three o’clock, bearing in mind we go on at about seven.
‘Hair and make-up and all that jazz, look through my notes, and then you are in the studio from half-five, six. We do some rehearsals, do some promos for the likes of Sky Sports News, and then we are underway for another night.
‘I feel like every year it has got bigger and bigger and bigger. My first World Championship was six years ago – it feels scary saying that – and every year I leave Ally Pally thinking, how can we top the last one? But here we are going into my sixth season presenting it and I feel like darts couldn’t be any bigger right now.’
It couldn’t indeed. Tickets for this World Championship sold out in seconds, and thousands upon thousands of fans will flood into the venue for world class darts. So many so that the tournament is moving to the Great Hall from next year, which will allow for an extra 70,000 fans.
Part of Sky’s broadcast work sees the presenters and pundits go live from close to the crowd – be that in the foyer or in the walk-on channel ahead of the games.
Fans that get close to the walk on will have their personalised signs that will appear on broadcast checked for appropriateness, and security will be absolutely rife as the players and broadcast team pass.
An often-drunken night out can result in issues, but it’s normally calm at Alexandra Palace – security doing their job and most of the fans there to simply have a good time.
‘It’s darts – there are rowdy fans for sure,’ Paton says. ‘But there is a lot of security around, and everyone is ultimately having a good time at the majority of places.
‘There have been very few incidents that I have seen. Maybe some of the bigger venues in the Premier League, where there have been fights breaking out, people throwing beer and stuff. But a lot of the time people are just having a good time and enjoying the darts.’
And so it’s time for darts to take centre stage again. This year, it has the Ashes to compete with in terms of popularity as well as the regular festive increase in football matches but, make no mistake, it will more than hold its own.
Luke Littler starts his quest for a second world domination in as many years on Thursday night against Darius Labanauskas on Thursday night – the defending champion traditionally in action on opening day. He is the heavy, heavy favourite to win the championship again – but can anyone stop him?
‘It’s so hard to see, unless someone can get him early,’ Paton says, referencing The Nuke’s relentlessness over the longer format. ‘He was pushed all the way in the second round by Ryan Meikle last year.
‘He’s got to be off his game a little bit and someone’s got to be off their game. Even his bad games these days, you’re looking at a 97 average and saying this is really poor. He averaged 102 in one of his matches at the Players Championship finals and we were feeling like it was a rubbish game for him. Of course it’s not, but he has got these ridiculous levels at the moment.
‘We want fireworks every time we see him – he is a flashy character and because of what he’s done already in this sport, we want more and more. It’s going to be so hard to stop him.
‘Of course Luke Humphries is in the other half of the draw, he’s the main protagonist on the other side, and no doubt leading up to the tournament all the talk is about those two meeting in the final. But we know what can happen – Luke Humphries in his title defence last year was taken out by Peter Wright, who was in nowhere near his best form, but produced the good on the Ally Pally stage.
‘Anything can happen, but everyone of course is going to be fearing The Nuke this year.’
Sky Sports and NOW will be exclusive home of the World Darts Championship, with 20 days of unmissable action starting on December 11.
