Gary Lineker signed off from Manchester Central with a line that captured why the night had already lost the room. Fallon Sherrock, he told the global audience, had “walked in here as a hairdresser” and was walking out £501,000 richer having beaten the world champion. The Englishwoman is a qualified hairdresser. She is also an MBE, a Premier League Darts semi-finalist and the first woman to win a match at the PDC World Championship, and that description landed badly.

Darts broadcaster Matthew Edgar called out the framing, pointing out that Sherrock has played in 13 World Championships. The comparison doing the rounds online, collected by GiveMeSport, was that calling Sherrock a hairdresser was like calling Lineker a TV presenter from Leicester.

Lineker called the legs ‘frames’

The hairdresser line was only the loudest misstep. Across the broadcast, Lineker was audibly out of his depth on darts, including repeatedly calling the legs “frames”, a term from snooker, as Dartsnews catalogued in its post-show review.

Writing for Sporting Life, former PDC professional Paul Nicholson delivered a blunt verdict on the host.

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“Did Gary do a great job for a darts event? When he’s fronting football coverage he can obviously lean on a lot of his experience but he didn’t have enough knowledge about darts,” Nicholson wrote.

The panel fared better in Nicholson’s assessment. He praised Laura Turner for giving the line-up credibility and backed Richard Osman’s enthusiasm for the sport, while dismissing comedian Lee Mack as out of place next to them.

14 one-leg matches in a row

The format was the other complaint. Netflix sent 14 challengers to face Littler in a single leg of 501 before Sherrock finally took the prize off him, and critic Samuel Gill told Dartsnews the repetition drained the drama out of the night.

“It was kind of mind-numbing, in my opinion,” Gill said.

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Several players never even made it to the oche. Gill told Dartsnews it was a shame that contestants including WDF number one Mitchell Lawrie and Ashley Coleman were left in the back room without a chance on stage, and that the format needed rethinking if Netflix ran the show again. Reviewers argued the broadcaster had the raw material for an X Factor-style build-up with contestant stories told across preliminary episodes, and used almost none of it.

A hit everywhere except with the critics

The numbers made the backlash more awkward for Netflix. The event went straight to No. 1 in the UK and No. 2 in Ireland on 31 October 2026, charting in 15 countries from Germany and Austria to Croatia, Finland and Luxembourg. By comparison, The Netflix Cup in 2023 only reached four countries.

Sherrock, the 15th challenger to walk up, needed a 15-dart leg to win what Sky Sports described as the second-biggest prize in darts history, surpassed only by Littler’s £1m PDC World Championship win.

“I fit the criteria for this. I’ve never had a tour card,” she said afterwards, pushing back against suggestions she was too established to belong on a show marketed around amateurs.

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“I’m just so happy to overcome all the hate and win.”

Littler himself has already left the door open to a return, telling the panel on the night he would be happy to do it again in 2027. Netflix has not confirmed a second edition.

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