{"id":198701,"date":"2025-12-18T17:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T17:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/198701\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T17:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T17:48:07","slug":"pdc-world-darts-championship-2026-david-munyua-stuns-world-number-18-mike-de-decker-in-first-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/198701\/","title":{"rendered":"PDC World Darts Championship 2026: David Munyua stuns world number 18 Mike de Decker in first round"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Kenyan debutant David Munyua caused a huge shock at the PDC World Championship, coming from two sets down to beat world number 18 Mike de Decker in an enthralling end to Thursday&#8217;s afternoon session.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Although Munyua had acquitted himself well on his first appearance at Alexandra Palace, an upset had looked extremely unlikely when the Belgian moved within one set of victory.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Munyua, who works as a vet, missed darts to win the second set, did the same in the third but eventually won it, edged the fourth and fought back to win the match in the fifth.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The 30-year-old, who qualified via the African Darts Group Qualifier, was broken in the first leg of the decider but produced an astounding outer bull-treble 20-bullseye 135 finish to level it, before holding his nerve to complete victory.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In his on-stage interview after the match, Munyua described his win as &#8220;amazing&#8221; and said it was a &#8220;very big moment for the sport, for Africa and for Kenya&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Former BDO world champion Mark Webster said on Sky Sports: &#8220;This is what the World Championship is all about. Forget about the stats in terms of big averages &#8211; it had drama all the way through.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;David put in a big performance. It just backs up that we&#8217;re going global with this sport.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The defeat continued De Decker&#8217;s disappointing record at the World Championship, with the 2024 World Grand Prix winner yet to make it past the last 64 at six appearances at Alexandra Palace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kenyan debutant David Munyua caused a huge shock at the PDC World Championship, coming from two sets down&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-198701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}