THE 2025 PDC World Darts Championship got underway last week and it hasn’t taken long for the tournament to bring the entertainment to Alexandra Palace, London.

Players from all over the world took to the stage as the first-round matches began on Sunday and are set to finish this Saturday afternoon.

The early rounds of any large-scale sporting contest can be hit and miss. There can be mismatches and one-sided games, or low-quality action that fails to capture the imagination of spectators and supporters in these early stages.

That has not been the case at the Ally Pally.

An early peak in the tournament came on Thursday when there were several outstanding performances in high-quality games and plenty of drama and tight contests in the evening session.

Unfortunately for 2023 champion and number two seed Michael Smith, the role he played was that of the felled giant. He was knocked out by Kevin Doets in a second round game (the first and second rounds are played alongside each other early in the tournament) after their match went to a tense final set tiebreaker.

Earlier on Thursday, Callan Rydz put in one of the standout performances of the tournament so far, finishing his win against Romeo Grbavac with an average of 107.06.

It was the highest-ever average posted by a player at this stage of the tournament, edging Luke Littler’s 106.12 from the same stage last year.

The Croatian, Grbavac, played well too, with an average of 97.92 but when a player is scoring and finishing as Rydz did, these first-to-three-sets games can be over fairly quickly.

“Winning on that stage, it’s the most iconic stage in darts,” Rydz said after his impressive performance.

“I could average 71, if I win I don’t care, but the performance tonight is an added bonus.

“I know if my game turns up I can beat anyone and if I do that for another few games and I’m world champion, happy days like, I might retire as well!”

In other highlights, Canadian Matt Campbell put in one of the most convincing single-set performances you’re likely to see in the third set of his 3-2 win against Mensur Suljovic, but the Austrian made a game of it as part of that Thursday night entertainment.

On the same night, Scott Williams defeated Niko Springer in one of the matches of the tournament so far, followed swiftly by the Smith v Doets drama.

Doets’s first-round match was played on Tuesday when his opponent Noa-Lynn van Leuven made history, becoming the first transgender player to make an appearance at the tournament.

A boisterous Aly Pally crowd in attendance for the early games of the afternoon session got right behind Van Leuven and Doets, with Doets eventually winning the match 3-1.

“I hope they were with me, I guess they were with me!” Van Leuven said of the support from the crowd. 

“But they just want to see good darts, and both Kevin and I showed good darts.”

There is a lot of attention on Van Leuven, who regularly reiterates that she simply wants to play darts.

But when asked post-match, she spoke about transphobia in sports and in life generally, stirred up to harmful levels by certain high-profile transphobic media on the front and, increasingly, the back pages, and often followed up by the actions of governments and sporting governing bodies.

The support for her from the Ally Pally crowd showed how detached the reality can sometimes be from transphobic narratives some influential media and high-profile public figures try to push.

“The PDC has been really supportive towards me, towards anyone. They stand behind their own rules, and it's great to see what they’re doing,” Van Leuven said.

“If you look at other sports, I guess it’s the easy way out to ban trans people. If they’ve gone through puberty they’re not allowed to play anything any more, it’s terrible.

“The most important thing is to be yourself. Other sports are banning people to take the easy way out.

“If we look at the UK right now, they banned puberty blockers. Why can’t people just be themselves? Who are they to judge?”

Fallon Sherrock was the other player to qualify from the Women’s Series, while another top women’s player, Beau Greaves, opted to play in the women’s WDF World Darts Championship instead.

Sherrock remains the only woman to have won a game at the World Championships when she defeated Ted Evetts and Mensur Suljovic in the 2020 edition. She narrowly lost 3-2 to Ryan Meikle in this year’s first round.

Some Celtic footballers were among the crowd earlier in the week, while famous singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran was among the 3,200 spectators in attendance for Friday’s afternoon session.

“They’re all here to watch a window cleaner take on a caravan salesman from the Netherlands in a game of darts, because this sport is the greatest in the world,” said Sky Sports commentator Dan Dawson.

After the entertainment on show in the first week of this year’s World Darts Championship, it’s difficult to argue otherwise.