The established alpha buffalo of Britain’s Premier League Darts currently find themselves under the spell of a newly-arrived portly python with a weakness for hair fudge.
Peter Wright, better known around the board as ‘Snakebite’, has darts disciples going ape as he sweeps through the 2014 season in a storm of sparkling craftsmanship and interchangeable Johnny Rotten-esque hairdos.
After his underdog surge to the 2014 World Championship final, the powers-that-be at the Professional Darts Corporation took a punt on his respective purple patches by including him in this year’s version of the lucrative 10-man league.
And so far it’s paying handsomely.
Pigeonholed early on by critics as a fairytale inclusion mainly for his bad flares and rad flair, Wright now finds himself leading the pack after four rounds of action.
The scalps he’s collected to get there ain’t no nuffies.
Following a steady 7-3 debut win over Wes Newton and a grappling 6-6 draw with Dave Chisnall, Wright coiled and hissed in Belfast with an electrifying domination of darts czar Phil Taylor to the tune of 7-4.
He then proved this to be no false alarm by following up with a 7-1 humiliation of two-time World Champion Adrian Lewis in front of a rapaciously adoring home audience in Glasgow, a result which leaves him alone at the top of the leaderboard and far-and-away the flavour of the darting month.
It’s not only his sweet spear-slinging that is endearing him to the travelling boozehounds of the British game, nor his gravity-spurning thatch that surely requires the hard labour of a team of 10+ and an abundance of scaffolding beforehand.
It’s Wright’s laconic style, shown in his blithe disposition towards his opponents reputations and his mid-throw skylarking with the gallery, that has fat blokes everywhere clearing the supermarket shelves of peroxide bottles to emulate their new serpent lord.
Whether the incandescent Scot can continue this unpredictable rise through the weathered veterans he finds himself among remains to be seen.
One thing he can be sure of, there are severely testing times to come with a clamouring mass of alphas on his tail that are well known and highly dangerous.
Firstly, there’s the looming shadow of ‘The Power’.
The six-time Premier League champion found himself languishing friendless at the foot of the table with an underwhelming 0-3 record in the early stages of competition, with followers in a frenzy at what it all meant.
Was it his new brand of darts that had him amiss? Perhaps he needed a table load of mashed potato topped with ice cream after being on a diet for so long?
Or, lo and behold, could he just be a fading and famished force who could no longer cut it at the top table?
However, Taylor answered emphatically with a massive ‘git nicked’ to the doubters in week four, with the signs obvious from the outset that England’s most decorated athlete was back in the saddle.
He employed zesty body language to the heaving synth of ‘Snap’ as he hit the stage and then backed this up with his vintage deadliness at the oche, and what resulted was a chilling statement to the rest of the competition as he devoured ‘our boy’ Simon Whitlock, who at 0-4 has surely found himself in the box seat for relegation.
However, as thrilling as Taylor’s resuscitation may be, many darts aficionados are predicting that the greatest danger to Snakebite’s bubble and the title itself will come in the form of a fiery double Dutch-oven.
Fellow chrome-domed countrymen Michael Van Gerwen and Raymond Van Barneveld are sitting ominously in the frontrunner’s rear-view mirror with both on 3-1 records.
Van Gerwen, the defending champion, is a frightening speci-man who has continued his violent earth-moving of all in front of him so far in 2014, and Van Barneveld, a much more gentler-looking fellow with a lazy five world titles, is producing performances reminiscent of his golden years.
Both are toit on the tail of Snakebite. Can he keep his coiffure cool and keep up the momentum?
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