Fired-up Fallon back at Palace Christmas feast... and warns: I’m hungrier than ever! QUEEN’S MESSAGE
FALLON SHERROCK makes her second coming as Queen of the Palace tonight – grateful for her encore after lockdown threatened to sink her rising star.
When she became the first woman to beat male opponents at the PDC World Championship two years ago – knocking out Ted Evetts and No.11 seed Mensur Suljovic – ex-hairdresser Sherrock was on the crest of a blow-wave.
She followed up her success at Alexandra Palace by holding Glen Durrant to a 6-6 draw as a guest challenger in the Premier League.
But when Covid struck in 2020, Sherrock’s exhibition work dried up and her invitation to play in the World Series at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden was left in the pending tray.
Although she played in a handful of online exhibition matches, including a narrow 7-6 defeat by legend Phil Taylor, she feared her brush with fame was done.
But in a thrilling resurgence, she reached the Nordic Darts Masters final in September with an 11-10 win, from 9-3 down, against Dimitri van den Bergh.
She led former world No.1 Michael van Gerwen 6-3 in the final before going down 11-7, and at last month’s Grand Slam she produced a 170 finish against Gabriel Clemens to reach the knockout phase, where she beat Suljovic again.
Sherrock said: “When Covid hit, I thought it would never happen for me. Then I turned my mindset around and thought, ‘You made it happen once – make it happen again’.
“It has made me more hungry for it, I feel I am playing better than before lockdown, purely because I want to get back there.
“I knew after the 2019 worlds when everything was opening up for me that I was getting tired and lazy.
“If I’m honest, I knew I wasn’t putting in the hours. I am now. I got thrown out of my comfort zone. I went from ‘quiet Fallon’, where no one knew who I was, to someone everyone seemed to know.”
If Sherrock, 27, was unsure how far that fame resonated, trans-Atlantic messages of support from tennis legend Billie Jean King and Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker soon put her right.
She laughed: “You don’t expect these iconic people to be reaching out to you over a game of darts!”
Sherrock’s first-round opponent tonight is former Lakeside world champion Steve Beaton – and she’s planning to get this Christmas party started in style.
She said: “I want to send the crowd mental, hit a 180, make them explode.”