Glen Durrant: I Never Call Myself A World Champion

I never call myself a world champion. I call myself a Lakeside champion…

It’s that time of year again. World Darts Championships, in those great cathedrals of thunder and tungsten, fling open their doors wide and more than a month of darting mayhem gets underway. In the eye of this sporting cyclone sits a man forged in the very furnaces of darting destiny – a three-time Lakeside winner, a Premier League champion, and one of darts most articulate prophets: Glen Durrant.

Darts World’s AJ Urmston-Toft sat down with Duzza in a moment of calm before the incoming storm. What followed was nothing less than a masterclass – a sermon delivered by one who has walked both temples of darts and lived to tell the tale.

First question for a man who has played on both iconic stages – Lakeside or Ally Pally? A question not whispered but launched like a tungsten missile into the heart of darting mythology. The two cathedrals of arrows. The twin giants of the sport. One steeped in smoke, sweat, history and pantomime; the other a roaring amphitheatre of lights, lasers and modern-day gladiators. The gauntlet thrown. The legend invited to choose his church.

“I loved Lakeside. When I first went in, before the smoke, lights and everything, and I thought, wow, is this it? It lacked a little bit of disappointment. And as soon as the lights went down, as soon as the smoke machine come on, the smell.

“For me, there’s been no better place than the Lakeside. Whereas Ally Pally, I was shocked at the professionalism. Now at Lakeside, I went in on the night session and the sponsors and friends of the players on the afternoon session were in there and they were all sort of tanked up and I was like falling over in there.

“I would never, ever say anything bad about the Lakeside stage venue, my time there. And Ally Pally, I reached the quarter-final in the first one there and I saw that as a real success…”

“For me, it was the motivation that was the real thing. I wanted to be a two-time champion. There’s the element that when I won the first one, I’ve never had that feeling, even winning the Premier League. I never had the feeling when I hit the winning dart to beat Danny Noppert for that first Lakeside.

“If I could have bottled that, I’d be a billionaire now. It was just absolutely incredible. But I wanted it again and again. So there was just something inside…”

Most would expect that answer from a man originally steeped in the BDO/WDF traditions of the game and especially one who breathes rarefied air with only Eric Bristow and Raymond van Barneveld for winning three (or more) titles. But his next comment may shock you.

“… that’s why I never call myself a world champion. I call myself a Lakeside champion. Proud of it. I’ve got the trophy upstairs. Never called myself a world champion because at the same time of me winning, then Michael van Gerwen and the others, Phil Taylor, et cetera, winning there.

“So I always call myself a Lakeside champion…”

Duzza was not totally doing himself down though he did consider that he rose to the peak of the game a short while later:

“…the week I beat Daryl Gurney in Liverpool in March 2020….that’s the only time of my life I’ve ever felt the best player in the world. That one night of beating him, I could have threw them underarm…there was a couple of weeks during that Premier League campaign where I felt on top of my game and I felt invincible.”