World champion Luke Littler’s hopes of defending his World Grand Prix title were dashed as he fell to a shock first-round defeat by Luke Woodhouse in Leicester. <\/p>\n
Littler, 19, had been looking to bounce back from his quarter-final exit to Jonny Clayton at the World Series of Darts Finals just over a week ago. <\/p>\n
But despite taking the first set, he was distinctly below par throughout the best-of-three encounter, averaging just 82.41. <\/p>\n
That allowed Woodhouse to level the match and deliver a checkout of 75 to win the deciding set 3-1 in legs. <\/p>\n
Woodhouse will face 2022 runner-up Nathan Aspinall in the last 16, who edged past Dutch debutant Kevin Doets 2-1.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Monday, six-time winner Michael van Gerwen lost five legs out of the last six as 2024 semi-finalist Ryan Joyce fought back to win 2-1.<\/p>\n
England’s Joyce will play Dutchman Danny Noppert, who advanced past Germany’s Niko Springer by the same scoreline.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Wales’ Gerwyn Price only lost a single leg as he comfortably beat Poland’s Sebastian Bialecki 2-0 to set up a meeting with England’s Ross Smith, who came from behind to triumph 2-1 against Scotland’s Cameron Menzies.<\/p>\n
Welshman Clayton edged past Krzysztof Ratajski 2-1, and he will take on the Netherlands’ Wessel Nijman, who overcame 2018 world champion Rob Cross in straight sets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World champion Luke Littler’s hopes of defending his World Grand Prix title were dashed as he fell to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-614832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}