The thing is, neither of these guys are the most demonstrative and it's why there have been great games for the wrong reasons. I've been watching darts for television since '72, from the time that Alan Evans and Leighton Rees were top dogs and an Irishman called Tommy O'Regan captained both Ireland and England. And the first truly great match was when Evans played Eric Bristow in '79.

That game put our viewing figure up to 7.3m because they both were cockbirds as we say in Geordie-land. Cocks of the walk, strutting their stuff.

They hated each other.

Drink was taken by Evans.

Bristow was never really a heavy drinker, he'd have two or three pints of lager but Evans used to stoke up on much heavier stuff. He was a really aggressive Welshman but what a player. What a player.

He started waving his arms at Bristow and telling him, 'I'm going to smash your cockney face in'. This was on BBC2 for God's sake.

A couple of years later was the next great game with Evans again. This time it was against Jockey Wilson who would often have half a bottle of vodka and five or six pints of lager. Again there was a war. Jockey had a lighter that was as big as a suitcase and Evans was a non-smoker.

Every time Evans went for a double there was a sudden clink and eventually Evans turned around and said quite clearly, 'I'm going to break your f**king jaw'. Greats in a different way, but not like the sheer standard the final proved to be last week.

It's why it's such a great bonus Barney has come over from the British Darts Organisation, to the Professional Darts Corporation. People often talk about the two coming together but there is not a chance of that ever happening.

I've got a degree in modern history from Cambridge and my particular area of study was the clashes of the great powers. Today the way power is structured is democracy.

The guy who started the BDO, Ollie Croft, never understood that. He wanted to be the Alf Ramsey of darts. If Ramsey told Jack Charlton he was the goalie or the corner flag for a day, then Charlton was just that. That might have worked in 1973 but in 1993 it wasn't doing the game much good.

The split began thanks to John Lowe, whose father was in the National Union of Mineworkers. They were the strongest trade union in the free world when Mrs Thatcher decided she'd hire the forces of the state to destroy us, but in '88 Lowe was talking about worker power in darts. But there was an autocracy, which disappeared everywhere else in the Magna Carta. So the players loosely formed a body representing them, the World Darts Council. In 1993, a ban was issued saying anyone who played in or who associated with the WDC would be thrown out of the BDO. What happened was a fella stopped putting a door on Phil Taylor's house because he was afraid he was going to get kicked out of his darts team. In Geordie-land, there was a bloke up a ladder spotting the crowd at exhibitions. I'm not saying Ollie Croft ordered a witchhunt, but take it from Sidney, that's what happened.

The likes of Taylor, Dennis Priestly and Rod Harrington mortgaged their houses and came up with £100,000 to go to court in '97 but each side pulled out at the last minute.

It was a de facto win for the WDC which became the PDC.

So the BDO had outgrown itself. Croft wanted to run world darts from a semidetached house in London like a character from Dickens. It could never happen.

Now, it's not about who has the better championship. It's about a title that came about because some guys put their livelihoods on the line. Last week, we saw the greatest game ever to decide that title.

Sid Waddell is a legendary darts commentator.