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Your support makes all the difference.THE ATMOSPHERE at the Circus Tavern when the darts players are in town is an assault on the senses. You can see it, taste it and smell it, thanks to the combined efforts of a couple of smoke machines and several hundred dedicated puffers. Your eardrums bulge when someone hits a big checkout. And when you shift your feet on the Tavern carpet, there is a faint stickiness, the legacy of a thousand spilled lager-and-blacks.
There is nothing in sport quite like it, especially when a legend of the game is about to make his way the oche. There are not many of them left, the men who were household names in the late 1970s and 80s, a time when small children would write to Jimmy Saville claiming that their greatest wish in life was to meet Eric Bristow. The fortunes of people such as Jocky Wilson, Bobby George and the Crafty Cockney himself have tended to mirror those of darts as a whole. Bristow, for one, was embarrassingly poor as he lost every leg of his first-round match in the PDC World Championship on Monday night.
One man, though, has been rolling back the years this week, and the fans were queueing from mid-morning yesterday to see him. It is 23 years since "Big" Cliff Lazarenko walked off a building site and into the uncertain life of a professional darts player. Even in a sport with little time for weight-watching, his nickname came naturally. Lazarenko is big in the same way that water is wet, and, just in case anyone is in any doubt, there is the trademark white shirt, which does nothing to flatter his figure. He was the wrong side of 20 stone even then. These days, if anything, he is even heavier.
Lazarenko never had the killer instinct of Bristow, or the wild streak of Wilson, but he never kept his feelings in either, and the fans still love him for it. He was an 11-4 chance before his match with Steve Brown yesterday, which in a two-horse race is almost no-hoper territory. For the hundreds sweating in the Circus pea-souper, though, he was the main man, and they stamped, yelled and sang their approval for every ton or winning double.
Big Cliff soaked it up, and then started to give it back. The first leg of the match went to Brown, but then Lazarenko took three in a row and with them the first set. Ten minutes later, as he claimed the second set too, he tried a little dance. It turned out to be more of a wobble, but the crowd knew what he meant and the roars grew louder still.
For Brown, it was all too much. His shots at doubles were drifting into adjacent beds, while Lazarenko's arrowed their way to the centre of their target. With three of the next four legs, Big Cliff was into the quarter- finals, and the player and his army of followers punched the air as one.
He is still among the outsiders to win this, the first of two so-called world championships which will be played out over the next two weeks. Phil Taylor, the winner at the Circus Tavern for the last four years, is as close to unbeatable as any darts player has ever been, and would start as hot favourite for the rival championship, the Embassy at Frimley Green, were he eligible to play. In its present fractured state, though, Lazarenko's sudden rejuvenation could be just what darts needs.
"A while back I was going through the motions," he said afterwards. "I even put the darts away for two or three months, but then one night I decided to go upstairs and practise. I've gone back to the nitty-gritty, to the way I was. I'm being a bit raw."
And putting on a show, keeping the punters happy. "The PR people might say that the Big Cliff white shirt is old hat," he said, "but if I walked out in dull blue, they wouldn't be able to relate to me. I still remember where I came from. I know how it feels if you're not up there playing, so if I can give something back of the feeling I get from being on stage, why the hell not? I love this game, and it has deteriorated for long enough. It's time now for it to grow again."
Darts will never again grip the public consciousness like it did 20 years ago. Even when all things 1970s were briefly fashionable again recently, darts was not invited to the party. Yet when Big Cliff goes to the oche once more tomorrow night, the thoughts and hopes of thirtysomethings everywhere will go with him.
As the man himself put it yesterday: "The big fella is playing well. End of story."
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