Premier League Darts: ‘I reckon in three years, I’ll dominate the game - I really do,’ says world champion Rob Cross

Cross rocked the sport of darts when he became world champion just 11 months after turning professional

Cross believes he is the man to take over from Phil Taylor at the top of the sport (Getty)

Rob Cross arrives for the interview clutching a bottle of Diet Coke, freshly purchased from the hotel bar in which we are meeting.

“You didn’t pay for that yourself, did you?” asks Dave, the Professional Darts Corporation’s head of media, reaching instinctively for his pocket.

“Yeah.”

“But we’ve got a tab open.”

Cross simply shrugs. Getting to put your drinks on somebody else’s tab is just another of those things he has been trying to get used to over the last few months. Plenty has changed in his life ever since the former electrician pulled off one of the greatest shocks in darts history to become the PDC world champion earlier this year. He gets recognised in the street. Random people even turn up at his front door in Hastings asking for a cup of tea and a chat. (He allows them a chat, but not the tea.) But perhaps the most symbolic change in his life, since picking up the £400,000 winner’s cheque in January, has been the pots.

“We used to have seven or eight pots at home,” he says. “One pot would be the water bill, that’d be the electric bill, the gas bill. Every week when I got paid, I’d chuck £20 in one pot, £50 in another. And I’d do this religiously, every month. Now I go home and look for the pots, and they’re not there anymore.”

In many ways, Cross has changed very little. He still lives in the same house in Hastings with his wife Georgia and three children. The only indulgence he has allowed himself since becoming world champion was a new car. “I’m not a massive spender,” he admits. “I look at the bank balance building, but it just looks like Monopoly money, really.”

If success has come as something of a shock to Cross, then it’s had a roughly similar effect on everyone else. It’s hard to think of a comparable rise in modern sport: from turning professional in early 2017 to becoming world champion at his first attempt just 11 months later. Ever since, he has proven it was no fluke, rising to No3 in the world and reaching the Premier League finals. Aged just 27, Cross is the rising force in darts, and his semi-final with Michael van Gerwen on Thursday night at the O2 will be the next milestone in a duel that looks set to define the sport for the next few years.

Of course, everyone has been desperate to find out how he did it. And unlike many players who shun self-analysis and simply step up and throw, Cross has devoted a good deal of thought into his own rise, and puts it down to a combination of smart tactics, ferocious work-ethic and industrial vats of self-belief.

“I would say darts is probably 15 per cent throwing,” he explains. “The rest of it is mental strength. Being able to hold your nerve. I’ve had people tell me for years I should have gone professional. I’m a big believer, though, that if I’d gone earlier, the game would have broken me mentally. Because you’re not mature enough to deal with what’s put in front of you: the stage, the pressure. Some people would probably call it arrogance. And I suppose you have to have that bit of arrogance to do what you do.”

Cross came from nowhere to win the World Championship this year (Getty)

Was he always this confident?

“No, not really. For instance, if someone was to say, ‘Right Rob, go up on that stage and read from a piece of paper’, I probably couldn’t do it. But if you’d said: ‘Rob, there’s a set of darts, go and put three in the treble-20’, I would have gone and done it. It’s a different kind of confidence. Having this job has brought me out of my shell a little bit.”

Cross was, by all accounts, a fairly normal kid. His mother worked in a school, his father in a warehouse. But for as long as he can remember, he was crazy about darts. He hit his first 180 at the age of 11, his first nine-darter at the age of 17. But then, life kicked in. “You get your first house, I had the kids, and you have a bit more responsibility to pay the bills,” he said. I didn’t play for a couple of years.”

And so he trained as an electrician, playing the odd local competition to keep his eye in. In October 2015, he tried to qualify for the smaller British Darts Organisation world championship, and was disqualified for sipping a glass of water. No drinks were allowed on stage. “I was branded a cheat,” he says. “I’ve never cheated at anything. That hurt me. For a few months, I fell out of love with the game.”

Then, in early 2016, his uncle persuaded him to give it one more go, at a UK Open qualifier in Norwich. Cross won, reached the last-32 of the main tournament, and was sufficiently encouraged to try and earn his tour card. When he finally decided to hang up the claw hammer and pliers in early 2017, he gave himself two years to make it as a professional.

“I’d been telling myself it was going to be so hard,” he said. “That I probably wasn’t going to win a leg. So when I got annihilated, it wouldn’t hurt as bad. And then, after two or three months on tour, I thought: it ain’t that bad. Let’s kick on. When you’ve worked five days a week, you learn that work ethic. I could play decent darts when I was 18, but did I have that work ethic? Probably not.”

It helped that Cross has always been something of a workaholic - even when he took a few days’ holiday after becoming world champion, he still made sure to take his dartboard with him. It helped, too, that he had the sort of quirky, unconventional style that often threw opponents. Before a big dart, he would often take a few seconds, step away from the oche, and recompose himself. His finishing combinations are unusual, and yet meticulously thought-through. Warning: the next few sentences contain some extremely nerdy darts tactics chat.

Cross beat the legendary Phil Taylor to win the World Championship (Getty)

“I’ve got three predominant trebles,” he says. “If I drop short on 20s, I’m going to go 19s. If I drop short on 19s, I’m going to throw at 18s. Anything else, I don’t really need. So the 161 against Michael [Van Gerwen] in the worlds, I went 54, 57, bull. It was unconventional. I don’t think anyone’s ever hit it like that on TV before. But I don’t throw treble-17. I’d always go 18s, 19s, because I throw at them more. Play to your strengths.”

Cross arrived at the World Championships on the back of a stellar season, with those in the know confiding that he was far, far more dangerous than his modest seeding of 20 suggested. And so it proved. Cross scrapped his way to the semi-finals, where he faced the great Van Gerwen. In what many observers have described as one of the great darts matches of all time, Cross shocked Van Gerwen by triumphing 6-5 in a sudden-death leg.

“Before the match I was thinking to myself: just don’t get whitewashed,” he admits. “But I was playing that well at the time. When it went to the sudden-death leg, I felt totally out of my comfort zone. You knew the importance of the leg, but the adrenalin blocks a lot of it out. I couldn’t even tell you what I hit in that last leg.”

Even so, everyone expected Cross to be swept aside in the final by Phil Taylor, the 16-time world champion playing his last ever match. Everyone, that is, except Cross himself. “When I got past Michael,” he says, “I had no doubt in my head I was going to win. Because Michael was the only thing that had stopped me in the previous six TV tournaments. And pretty much all game, I was relentless.”

Taylor never got a look-in. Cross trounced him 7-2, the biggest margin of victory in a world final since Taylor himself had beaten John Part nine years earlier. And yet, while the darts world reeled in stunned appreciation of its new star, Cross felt strangely at ease. “It was really weird,” he says. “When I first lifted the trophy, I felt... I don’t know what you call it. A premonition. I thought: this ain’t going to be the last time I’m lifting this. It felt right. It felt good.”

That self-belief again. And when the conversation moves to talk of the future, you get a measure of the simple, solid certainty with which Cross believes he is destined to reign. “I still feel like I’ve got another 20 per cent to give,” he says. “The learning, the progressing, is going to be done over the next two or three years. I’ve learned even more this year than last year. I reckon in three years, I’ll dominate the game. I really do.”

The journey from money pots and fuse boxes to darting immortality is, it seems, not all that great a leap. The shock of success may have jolted Cross, but it’s certainly not daunted him. The urge to provide for his three young children is what spurs him now. “I’d like to give them a better life,” he says. “Ideally, what I’d like to do is get each of them a house. But I believe nobody gets nothing in life for free. So they’d get a tiny mortgage they’d have to pay off. Just to give them a bit of responsibility.”

It seems appropriate, when talking about the next generation, to wonder whether Cross’s ambition to dominate the sport is really as realistic as he makes out. After all, this is a sport that has always seen new challengers, new faces, new pretenders to the throne. The late Eric Bristow begat Phil Taylor. Taylor begat Van Gerwen. Van Gerwen begat Cross. Surely whoever comes next will provide a greater challenge still.

“Don’t matter,” Cross says firmly, pushing his Diet Coke to one side with the air of a man who means business. “I’m going to be too strong. I’m not being funny. I know it’s going to sound harsh. But no-one else is going to feed your family. You’ve got to do it yourself.”

The Unibet Premier League Play-Offs will be held at The O2 in London on May 17, live on Sky Sports.