Mark Selby tells Shaun Murphy he ‘talks a lot of rubbish’ in nine-darter dig

Mark Selby relished the opportunity to mock audacious claim that he once hit a nine-darter. Selby, 41, recently to book his place in the Masters quarter-final.

The world no.5 was simply too good for Carter, recording breaks of 62, 108 and 93 on his way to overcoming the world no.11. Murphy, who is both playing and working as a pundit for the Masters, was extremely complimentary of Selby’s display at the Alexandra Palace.

Yet, instead of graciously accepting Murphy’s praise, Selby chose to have a cheeky dig at ‘the Magician’s’ adamant claim that he is one of the few people on the planet and a hole in one in

When told by the that Murphy thinks Selby is playing at the top of his game, the Jester from Leicester looked up towards the studios and said: “Yeah, but he talks a lot of rubbish. He reckons he’s had a nine-darter as well.”

The Magician did not inspire any confidence that his bold nine-darter claim is true. He double-downed on his claim on the podcast when he said: “At the end they told me to throw some darts. I haven’t played darts for nearly 15 years.

“Let me just point this out there, to be clear, I never claimed to be a really good darts player, ever. I used to play socially, once or twice a week in my old pub in Manchester when I lived up there a long time ago. I never claimed to be any good at it. But randomly one night, using a set of Phil Taylor darts which he’d sent to me as a gift, I threw nine perfect darts. I think I followed it with 26, it was ridiculous.”

Unfortunately for Murphy, when gifted an opportunity to show off his darts credentials in front of Michael van Gerwen and Luke Humphries, he hit a four with his first dart and then missed the board completely on his next two arrows.

To say sports fans are suspicious about Murphy’s nine-dart claim is a huge understatement. Instead of backtracking on his claim, Murphy insisted he only missed the board during the Paddy Power challenge because there were lots of people watching him.

He added: “So at the end of the challenge today, there’s a lot of barracking, a lot of banter, there’s TV crews, behind the cameras there’s 50 people stood there watching. I’m totally out of my comfort zone, I’ve got a scorer who wants to watch me fail, I’ve got Mark Williams wanting to see me fail. Van Gerwen, one the best of all time, the current world champion Luke Humphries has given me his darts.

“I’ve thrown the first one, held onto it for a bit long and hit two, thrown the next one, gone for double something and missed that, then on purpose I’ve thrown it into the cardboard backing.

“It was totally on purpose, I thought it was funny. The marker nearly collapsed, because it finished about a foot from his head. I thought that was an obvious joke, but it wasn’t.”