The last two legs
A best of 19 gives you room to be wrong for a while, which is roughly how Littler used it. Aspinall reached 9-8 and had the throw in the next leg, meaning Littler had to hold twice from there and win one of them against the darts to survive.
He held for 9-9. Then he broke, in 12 darts, in the nineteenth leg. That is the part worth pausing on: the deciding leg of a major against a player who has already taken you to the brink, on his throw, and the response is a 12-darter. Littler has built a year out of exactly that trick.
Aspinall goes home with ÂŁ10,000 and a persuasive case that he was the better player for two thirds of the match. He reached the final of this tournament in this same building in 2023, and the long format from round two onwards has always looked like the part of the week that suits him.
Saturday evening in full
Littler’s was the closest of four second-round ties that finished the last 16 and completed the bracket. All four went the way of the higher-profile name, but only Gerwyn Price made it look routine.
| Winner | Score | Beaten | Quarter-final |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luke Littler | 10-9 | Nathan Aspinall | Jonny Clayton |
| Jonny Clayton | 10-8 | Motomu Sakai | Luke Littler |
| James Wade | 10-7 | Wessel Nijman | Gerwyn Price |
| Gerwyn Price | 10-5 | Jim Long | James Wade |
James Wade against Wessel Nijman was the hostile one. Nijman is the home player the Amsterdam crowd had been saving itself for, he broke in the opening leg, and Wade answered with a 12-darter and then a 101 average across the rest of it. Nijman has still not beaten him: six meetings, six Wade wins.
Jonny Claytonneeded 18 legs to get past Motomu Sakai, who has quietly been the best story of the tournament outside the reserve call-ups — he beat Callan Rydz 6-5 on Friday and then took eight legs off a former champion. Price’s 10-5 over Jim Long was the one match of the session that never threatened to turn.
All four winners reached 10 legs; the bar is what they gave away getting there. Source: Sky Sports Darts, Darts World and dartsnews.com.
The quarter-finals, and a final that is already half-written
The complete last eight now reads as follows. Sunday’s afternoon session takes all four ties in draw bracket order, and the semi-finals and final both follow in the evening.
| Tie | Route to it | Previous titles here |
|---|---|---|
| Ross Smith v Josh Rock | Beat Gurney 10-5 and Searle 10-7 | None |
| Dirk van Duijvenbode v Gian van Veen | Beat Humphries 10-9 and Sedláček 10-7 | None |
| Gerwyn Price v James Wade | Beat Long 10-5 and Nijman 10-7 | Price 2020, 2022; Wade 2018 |
| Luke Littler v Jonny Clayton | Beat Aspinall 10-9 and Sakai 10-8 | Littler 2024; Clayton 2021 |
Read that last column down and the tournament has already decided something about itself. Every one of the four players in the bottom half — Price, Wade, Littler, Clayton — has won this title before. Not one of the four in the top half has: Ross Smith, Josh Rock, Dirk van Duijvenbode and Gian van Veen are all still looking for a first one. Van Duijvenbode has come closest, losing the 2022 final 11-10 to Price.
So Sunday night’s final is already guaranteed to be a former World Series Finals champion against a first-time champion in waiting. Only five men have ever won this title: Van Gerwen six times, Price twice, and Wade, Clayton and Littler once each. Four of those five are in this last eight, and the draw has put them in pairs, so two of them will be out by Sunday teatime.
Both halves got there a different way. The top half emptied out early: Daryl Gurney knocked out six-time champion Michael van Gerwen 6-5 on Thursday, and then Van Duijvenbode beat Luke Humphries 10-9 from 6-3 down on Saturday afternoon. The bottom half never lost anyone who mattered, which is why all four former champions are still stacked into it.
Three matches, 32 legs, one day
Whoever lifts it on Sunday night has to win three matches in a single day. The quarter-finals are the best of 19, and both the semi-finals and the final stretch to the best of 21, so the champion needs 10 legs, then 11, then 11 — 32 in a day, across as many as 61 if all three go the distance.
That is a different examination from the one Littler nearly failed on Saturday. He has now been taken to a last leg in Amsterdam, in a building that has booed him all week. He said afterwards that if the Dutch crowds stay as they are, he will stop entering European Tour events in the Netherlands: “There’s just no point in me travelling, wasting my time whilst I’m getting booed.” That is a notable thing for the sport’s biggest draw to put on the record in a season with two European Tour events left.
The prize ladder does not change on finals day: ÂŁ17,500 for a quarter-final defeat, ÂŁ30,000 for losing a semi, ÂŁ60,000 for the runner-up and ÂŁ100,000 to the winner from the ÂŁ450,000 fund. For Littler there is a second ledger running underneath it, because this is one of the titles still required for the clean sweep of majors in a calendar year that he confirmed in July he was still chasing. The routes all 32 players took into this field are in our Amsterdam qualification guide, the season then moves to Leicester for the World Grand Prix on 28 September, which sits with the rest of the run-in on our 2026 calendar, and every leg played on Sunday feeds the live PDC Order of Merit.