Luke Littler had a three-dart average of 114.47 as he beat Nathan Aspinall in the last 16 of the European Championship, while defending champion Gian van Veen was knocked out.<\/p>\n
World champion Littler raced into a 4-0 lead in Dortmund and, while Aspinall recovered to 5-4, he won the best-of-19 match 10-5.<\/p>\n
“I felt really good from the off,” 19-year-old Littler told ITV. “I was gutted I gave him that leg going into the break at 4-1 – I wanted 5-0. <\/p>\n
“But, as Nathan does, he’s always there and is going to come back at you so I couldn’t afford to drop off.”<\/p>\n
Littler has faced hostile treatment in Germany in the past and there was an incident midway through his match against Aspinall which caused a short pause in play.<\/p>\n
“Just before I went for bull on the 126, the front table just decided to bang really loud on the table,” said the world number one.<\/p>\n
“The guy that did it looked up, I pointed at him and said, ‘That’s you’.<\/p>\n
“Then he just picked up his pen, started writing on his little 180 card and didn’t look up. So, he knew what he’d done.<\/p>\n
“But that’s the first thing all weekend, the crowd’s been very good.<\/p>\n
“I’ve not been to Germany this year, apart from Berlin and Frankfurt, so it’s only the third time they’ve seen me.<\/p>\n
“Obviously I want a good reception because I want to be doing European Tours next year in Germany.<\/p>\n
“Whereas if they’re not good to me, then I won’t go. But so far, so good, and with the way I’m playing, hopefully they like it and I can produce maybe a bit better tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
Littler will play Krzysztof Ratajski, who beat Kevin Doets 10-8, in the quarter-finals on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Van Veen fell to a 10-6 defeat by Luke Woodhouse in the last match of the afternoon session.<\/p>\n
Woodhouse, who threw a nine-darter in his first-round win, had a three-dart average of 95.34 compared with Van Veen’s 91.47 and hit six 180s.<\/p>\n
He will play Ross Smith in the last eight after his fellow Englishman beat Damon Heta 10-7.<\/p>\n
Gerwyn Price also made it through with a 10-4 victory against Cameron Menzies and will face Stephen Bunting.<\/p>\n
Bunting played Kim Huybrechts, who won his first-round match after coming in as a late replacement for the ill Luke Humphries, and was a comfortable 10-3 winner.<\/p>\n
Jonny Clayton overcame Josh Rock 10-8 and will play Martin Schindler, who was a 10-4 victor against Jermaine Wattimena.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luke Littler had a three-dart average of 114.47 as he beat Nathan Aspinall in the last 16 of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-813030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gb","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}