{"id":272928,"date":"2026-01-31T01:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T01:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/272928\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T01:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T01:37:07","slug":"luke-littler-reaches-world-masters-round-two-after-scare-in-milton-keynes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/272928\/","title":{"rendered":"Luke Littler reaches World Masters round two after scare in Milton Keynes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Reigning world champion Luke Littler survived a major scare as he progressed to the second round of the World Masters in Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Despite winning the opening set, the 19-year-old faced defeat as Mike de Decker levelled the contest by hitting a bullseye to complete a 121 checkout. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Belgian then took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five set contest and he had a match dart after hitting two treble 20s when attempting a 142 check-out but he missed double 11 with his third arrow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">World number one Littler hit double 16 with his next dart to level the match and then opened with 180 on his way to taking the deciding set.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Littler called it a &#8220;tough&#8221; night, adding on ITV: &#8220;I didn&#8217;t get going. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;In the second and third set, Mike deserved to win them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I had to fight back and that&#8217;s what I did. I got over the line, found a bit of form and got the win.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reigning world champion Luke Littler survived a major scare as he progressed to the second round of the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-272928","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272928","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=272928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}