Fallon Sherrock: ‘I love to hustle people at the pub. And then I say: Google me’
When you’re one of the most famous darts players on the planet and you want to pop to your local cafe in Milton Keynes without being recognised, there is a certain protocol to be followed. A mask at all times. A big beanie hat to hide your blonde hair. No make-up, obviously. Even then, it’s far from foolproof.
“Every time I go in someone recognises me,” says Fallon Sherrock, sighing. “As soon as I take the hat off, people are staring. I’m like, I just want to eat my burger …”
Fame hit Sherrock like a hand grenade. In a way, she’s still processing the aftershock. Nothing could really have prepared her for what followed her groundbreaking run at the world championship in late 2019, becoming the first woman to reach the third round. There were TV bookings, invitations, photoshoots, messages by the thousand. Then came the vultures and the internet men, with curiously pointed opinions on everything from her darting ability to her appearance. For a regular 27-year-old with no particular craving for public attention, it was a lot.
“When it first started happening,” she says euphemistically, “I just got thrown in at the deep end. I had to learn how to deal with it.”
She has a management team now, who filter her social media feeds so she can still see the deluge of positive messages without having to sift through the trolls. But she’s still too timid to Google herself. “I’m scared of what I might see,” she says. “I’ve come off all the darts groups on Facebook. Otherwise I’m just sitting there looking and then I’ve wasted three hours.”
Does she get recognised a lot? “Sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes when I’m at the pub, people will ask if I want to play a game of darts and if they don’t know who I am I’ll say I’m not very good.”
Hang on. You hustle them? “Yeah, I love it. I last did it a couple of months back. But before lockdown I used to do it all the time. Just for a fiver. Or a drink. And then they go: ‘Oh, you’re actually quite good.’ And then I say: ‘Google me.’”
This is the point when you realise that there is more to Sherrock than meets the eye. For the past two years, you feel the entire sport of darts has been learning a similar lesson.
Sherrock’s world championship success was widely written off as an unrepeatable fluke. But in September, at the Nordic Masters, she became the first woman to reach the final of a televised PDC event, beating the world No 5, Dimitri Van den Bergh, and leading the great Michael van Gerwen 6-3 before losing 11-7. Then last month, at the Grand Slam, she shocked us again.
In her final group game, she played the imposing Gabriel Clemens. With the German on 68, needing one more leg to progress, Sherrock pulled off an incredible 170 finish – two treble-20s, then the bull – to win.
In the video of her checkout, which has been viewed almost 2m times online, you see her contorting herself in disbelief, unable to grasp how she had done it. “I’d not taken out 170 in about three years,” she says. “Like, it doesn’t happen.” She went on to reach the quarter-finals, where she pushed the world No 2, Peter Wright, all the way in a 16-13 defeat.
The curious part of all this is that there was very little in Sherrock’s record to suggest any of this was feasible. She was a decent women’s player – good enough to reach the Lakeside world final in 2015 – but still some way behind Lisa Ashton and Deta Hedman, legends of the game.
Week to week, in the smaller “floor events” that form the bread and butter of the tour, she generally posted threedart averages in the 70s and 80s: competent, but hardly elite.
But on the biggest stages, under the biggest pressure, she becomes something else entirely. Clutch doubles are nailed. Everything goes where it’s meant to.
Against Wright she averaged 99, a shade under Gerwyn Price’s winning average in last year’s world championship final. Put her on the stage, with a crowd at her back, and she ascends to the godly plane. It is, quite simply, one of the most breathtaking and baffling phenomenons in the world of sport. Ask Sherrock why it happens and she’s not really sure.
“People ask me and I cannot explain,” she says. “Because on the floor, I can’t do it. I feel like I’m at the same level as everyone else and they’re all looking at me and I don’t like people looking at me. I get distracted. My head’s away. But when I’m up on the stage, even though there’s cameras and millions of people watching, I just feel like I’m ... away from everyone. There’s so much space. No one can get me. I don’t understand it.”
Often you hear darts players talk about inhabiting a character: a stage persona that allows them to shed their inhibitions and be whoever they want to be. A disguise, almost. For Sherrock, the distinctive pink shirt and men’s prescription glasses (women’s glasses don’t suit her face, she says) are her costume. “I put the glasses on, and it’s like tunnel vision,” she says.
All of which leads to the question preoccupying the sport: is this simply a brilliant purple patch? Or on the other hand, is there still more magic to be unlocked? In short: how good is Sherrock? “I don’t know,” she says eventually.
“I’ve never been asked that one. I know I can average 100, same as every other player. If you can do that, you’re in any game, unless your opponent does something ridiculous. So I’d say I was confident, but realistic at the same time.
“I’ve shocked myself at how I’ve dealt with situations. I don’t think I’m any better than anyone else. I just think I can play the game to the same standard as everyone else.”
For the first time, Sherrock arrives in London for this year’s world championship with expectations to fulfil. Her performances in recent months have made her one of the headline attractions in a sport that has never knowingly passed up an opportunity to broaden its reach. There is growing pressure on the PDC to admit her to next year’s Premier League, a lucrative invitational competition featuring 10 of the world’s best players.
There are 128 players on the main PDC tour and Sherrock is not one of them. Every year, hundreds of hopefuls compete in a mass qualification event called Q-School in an attempt to secure one of the handful of available tour cards. It is a brutal, exhausting process and for the past three years Sherrock has come away empty handed. Her major tournament appearances have come either by invitation or through women-only qualifying series.
For some this is evidence enough that she still needs to learn, hone her game, do her time, before being allowed to leapfrog more established players into the Premier League. “She’s definitely got the game,” Price, the world champion, said recently.
“It’s just whether she can do it week in, week out. If she earned a tour card, she could go up against all those boys in the floor tournaments. I think she’d do really well. But she needs to earn it.”
Sherrock has largely tried to ignore the background chat. “I try not to get involved in the politics of it all,” she says. “I wouldn’t say no to it, of course I wouldn’t.”
But she’s also living proof of the idea that often it is opportunity that drives potential, not the other way around. Had the PDC not set aside two world championship places for women in 2018, we would never have discovered how good Sherrock could be. Given further opportunities, what else could we discover? Who else could we discover?
“It’s harder to try and promote the women when they haven’t got the confidence,” Sherrock says. “Because a lot of them are like: there’s no point, we’re not good enough. But you can be good enough. You just need to put the effort in, get the opportunities, put yourself in that scenario. That’s when you find out what you’re capable of doing. This is how the world is now. If a woman does something, the world’s going to go mental.”
Doubtless we can expect more hoopla if Sherrock gets past Steve Beaton in her first-round match on Sunday evening and more still if she beats Kim Huybrechts of Belgium three days later. If she reaches the fourth round she will almost certainly end the year in the world’s top 64, earn her tour card and avoid the lottery of Q-School in January.
“I don’t doubt I can make a massive dent in the tournament,” she says. “But if I don’t get a tour card, then at least I can play on the [second-tier] Challenge Tour and develop my game a bit more.”
It is the gift and the curse of all prominent sportswomen to become standard-bearers for their gender, whether they want to or not. Over
the past couple of years Sherrock has got used to being judged, being talked about, being seen.
But – as opponents, pundits and the startled pub patrons of Milton Keynes have discovered over the years – you underestimate her at your peril. Perhaps ultimately, you are as good as the stage you’re given. And Alexandra Palace in December is perhaps the biggest of them all.