Peter Wright’s mind games worked perfectly as he out-psyched Luke Humphries to dethrone the world champion in frenetic fashion.<br /><br />Snakebite, 54, defied the 25-year age gap and produced a masterclass of finishing to win 4-1 in the fourth round of the PDC World Darts Championship and back up his pre-game trash talk.<br /><br />Humphries, 29, dramatically bombed out of the competition, almost 12 months after he ruled the world for the first time.<br /><br />The world No. 1 will not defend the Sid Waddell Trophy – Gary Anderson 2016 was the last man to achieve that feat – after suffering his first defeat in nine successive games on the Ally Pally stage.<br /><br />It spectacularly opens up the top half of the draw and means 17-year-old Luke Littler has an excellent chance to become the youngest world champion in history.<br /><br />Two-time world champion Wright went from his sick bed to the doubles bed and took out exactly 70 percent of his doubles in the shock result of the 2024/25 tournament.<br /><br />The Scotsman, 54, riled the defending world champ pre-game by predicting Raymond van Barneveld would KO him in round three.<br /><br />That never happened, as the Dutchman lost early, but Wright had predicted that he and Barney would then have “the best game you’ve ever seen on the stage”.<br /><br />In response, the Berkshire thrower told his trash-talking foe there would be “an egg on his face” if he did not “smash me”.<br /><br />And in a proper verbal barb, he warned: “I’m one world title away from matching his career and I’m 25 years younger!”<br /><br />It added spice and intrigue to this clash and though they are actually good mates, there was only a cursory fist-bump at the start.
