16 December 19, 2021The Sunday TimesDarts PDC World Championship
G
rowing up, Fallon Sherrock
would be sitting on the sofa
in her family home in Milton
Keynes, trying to watch TV,
while from behind her
came an annoying, constant
thud as her mum, dad and
twin sister, all darts enthusi-
asts, attacked the board pegged to the
living-room wall.
“I’d be saying, ‘I’m trying to watch
something here,’ and then I’d end up
getting daggers, so I’d go, ‘OK, fine.’”
Sherrock’s match against Steve
Beaton this evening is arguably the
highlight of the first round of this
year’s PDC World Darts Champion-
ship. The 27-year-old, known as the
Queen of the Palace, became a house-
hold name in 2019 as the first woman
to beat a man at the tournament when
she defeated Ted Evetts and then
Mensur Suljovic to raucous cheers
inside Ally Pally and delighted incre-
dulity from the viewers.
Those endless darts games at home
were an irritant and she refused to
join in, but they played their part in
shaping a superstar who became
adept at the sport through a sort of
tungsten osmosis.“I had no interest in it, I’ll be bru-
tally honest, I had no interest in play-
ing darts at all,” she says, “but Fillie
[Felicia, her twin sister] has always
been interested in it. When our par-
ents took us to county competitions,
she would be intrigued by it, whereas
I was like, ‘I don’t want to be there.’ ”
Felicia asked her to practise with
her, but Sherrock would refuse, say-
ing there was no point, because she
did not understand what was going
on. Without knowing it, though, she
was learning how the game of 501
unfolded, what a treble meant, how to
throw the dart.
“The only thing I didn’t know,” she
says, “was how to hold the dart
because everyone holds it differently.
It got to a point where I was literally
going to the Super League [when aged
15 and 16] and saying, ‘I don’t want to
go,’ and Mum was saying, ‘You’re not
staying here on your own.’ And they’d
make me play a reserve game and
keep dragging me along until I
thought, ‘This is actually not too bad.’
“When I first started it took me ages
to win a game and then I started to hit
what I wanted to hit. I don’t give up, I
was determined, especially as my sis-
ter was winning. There is a competi-
tive side to me. When I started win-
ning, I started getting the confidence
and started getting better. It was only
when I started getting good that I said
I’d go to competitions. The more I
achieved, the more I pushed myself.”
Sherrock is wrapped in an over-sized cardigan, her hair cascading
over her shoulder.
“I don’t really know what to do with
it,” she says, pulling at it as if it might
unspool and drop to the floor. “Unless
I have to go anywhere, it just sits like
this. Do I cut it off? It’s a mess. I don’t
think the sponsors like it when I’m on
TV because it’s covering their logos.
I’m tempted to put my hair in plaits
[for the World Championship]because I think that might be a new
way forward.”
She became a hairdresser because
her parents, in spite of their devotion
to darts, did not make money from
their hobby.
“I knew no one who made a living
out of darts, it was just a hobby. I knew
there were players on TV but didn’t
know how much they made. So I
thought I needed a job. I loved hair-
dressing, I still cut hair now if people
ask me to. I like colouring hair, espe-
cially if they want a big change.”
As a family, the Sherrocks would go
to social clubs in Milton Keynes.
“There are certain pubs youALYSON
RUDD‘The only time I feel
sorry for opponents
is when the crowd is
against them. I say
sorry afterwards’
wouldn’t go in,” she says. “The social
clubs have pool tables and dartboards
and are not just a pub. I hated going
into a pub. They smell of beer and the
locals come and watch you and I hate
that.”
Even so, before she became recog-
nisable, Sherrock must have been
tempted to hustle those locals. After
all, a woman — and a petite one at that
— is not a stereotypical darts player.
“Me and my friends have been out,
and I’ve said, ‘I’m not very good,’ and
tricked them and their face after-
wards! So I say, ‘Google me.’ I forgot
my ID once and said, ‘Well, could you
google me then?’ and they gave me
the drink.
“Since the World Championship,
everyone knows who I am, and the
problem now is everyone throws their
A-game at me.”
Felicia, who has just had a baby,
plays to county level and, according to
Sherrock, is just as talented as her
twin but perhaps needs more
practice.
“She gets angry,” Sherrock says. “If
she did not get as frustrated, I think
she’d be fine. I think she would like it
to be her career. I mean, who
wouldn’t? It’s a great career to have.
You just play darts and it’s amazing.
“We have had some weird
moments. Once we had the same pain
in our side and then it went at the
same time, it was so dodgy. We under-
stand each other a little bit more than
most sisters would.”Sherrock peers into the camera on
her phone to look at the dartboard
behind me. Mine is very much a “play
darts at Christmas” sort of home and
she laughs and says she knows darts is
part of the Christmas tradition in
many households. She is not someone
who goes overboard at this time of
year other than to make it special for
Rory, her seven-year-old son, and
does not even have a favourite Christ-
mas film. The movie that was most
interrupted in her teens by her fam-
ily’s endless darts was Mean Girls.
She is speaking from the home of
Cameron Menzies, the Scottish darts
player who is her new partner. They
had known each other a few years
before becoming romantically
involved — he was the first of the men
on the circuit to say hello and the only
one to ask if she was coping because
no one else ever spoke to the self-con-
fessed socially awkward new face at
elite competitions.
Right there, I say, is the Christmas
movie she has been waiting for. “I
know, right,” she says, smiling.
Her son is autistic and will not be at
Alexandra Palace to watch his mum in
action because it will be too noisy and
crowded for him. So will he watch her
on TV?
“I want to say yes but I know for a
fact he doesn’t,” she says. “When he
was little, he got really confused and
would look behind the TV. He doesn’t
care if I win, he just wants to know if I
hit a bullseye. So, I will say I won, andFallon Sherrock
on family
influences, her
lazy technique
and taking on
the men
‘I like to
make the crowd go.
I feel like a
puppetmaster,
I can make
people go mental’
ALEX DAVIDSON