ANDERSON FIRED UP BY CRITICS

GARY ANDERSON says hearing people call him “done” has reignited his drive to win a third World Darts Championship.

‘The Flying Scotsman’ won back-to-back titles in 2015 and 2016 but has not reached a final since 2021.

World No14 Anderson insists he still has the game to join Phil Taylor and Michael van Gerwen as a three-time world champion.

Ando admits he was ready to ease off until the critics started questioning whether he could still cut it.

He said: “Oh, it would. Especially, I haven’t upset so many people.

“I mean, a million pounds, fantastic. You never would have thought it was going to be that and Barry [Hearn] is good at what he does.

“He loves his darts, and he’s pushed it, and he’s pushed it, and he’s pushed it. And it’s now probably the biggest game on the planet so it is good.

“But, yeah, it would be nice to win one more title.

“Usually I’m quite happy. A couple of weeks back, I was quite happy to go you know what? I’ve done my job on that.

“Then people started talking, ‘oh, he’s done, he’s this, he’ll never do it’ and that fires me back up, and I can’t stop playing. I keep carrying on.

“I think if everyone was nice and said ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ I probably would just drift away and stop playing.

“But you always get somebody that says that ‘he’s past it and that’ and I’m like no I’m not.”

The 54-year-old has flourished on the ProTour picking up the Players Championship 7 and European Darts Grand Prix titles this campaign.

Anderson believes he can still compete with the elite despite cutting down his practice hours.

He added: “I don’t put as much time into it but I’m still managing to play with the top players with the amount that I’ve played darts.

“I know that I do well for where my game is, so I just plug on now, don’t I? Just plug on.”

Ando reckons the sport has changed beyond anything he ever imagined, with the winner of the Sid Waddell trophy now earning a record £1million.

Anderon revealed the magic of Ally Pally still hits him the moment he arrives.

He continued: “I know the talk is about changing it but when you drive up that hill and you see Ally Pally sitting up there in the hill, that’s what gets your juices flowing. That’s what it’s all about.

“The whole year doesn’t really matter. It’s all about December, the World Championships.

“The whole year, if you’re playing bad, it doesn’t matter. You have still got that big one. If you can’t get yourself up for that, then you shouldn’t be playing the game.

“Even if you go back five years, what we were getting paid, we thought we would never be going to Australia, Dubai, China, Japan, everywhere playing darts.

“We’ve seen the world. I have done it all and travelling’s getting a bit hard for me, but with playing darts, I’ve seen the world.

“So, by playing a game that I love playing, I have got to see parts of the world that I probably would never have seen anyway so it has been great.”

Image by Taylor Lanning.