Between 2014 and 2018 Lisa Ashton won the BDO women’s world championship four times out of five. The one she missed, in 2016, ended in the quarter-finals against Trina Gulliver.
She was 43 when she won the first of them.
The Lancashire Rose
Ashton was born in Bolton on 27 August 1970 and has played since 1992. She played county darts for Lancashire, has represented England and supports Liverpool. The nickname is “The Lancashire Rose”. Both of her daughters, Danielle and Lindsey, play as well, and all three entered the qualifiers for the 2019 PDC World Championship.
Her first major title was the 2008 Zuiderduin Masters, where she beat Gulliver in the final.
Lakeside Before the Titles
Her world championship debut came in 2009, and Gulliver beat her 2–0 in the quarter-finals. In 2011 she turned the result round at the World Masters, beating Gulliver 4–1 in the final. At Lakeside, though, Gulliver beat her again in the 2012 quarter-finals.
The 2013 championship took her to the final for the first time, after wins over Deta Hedman and Sharon Prins. Anastasia Dobromyslova won it 2–1.
2014: Six Match Darts
The 2014 field had sixteen women for the first time. Ashton’s first-round match against Aileen de Graaf went to a sudden-death leg. She beat Tamara Schuur in the quarter-finals and Dobromyslova in the semi-finals, where she survived six match darts, and won the final 3–2 against Hedman. She hit ten 180s across the tournament.
She kept the title a year later with a 3–1 final against Fallon Sherrock, and added the BDO World Trophy, beating Dobromyslova in that final.
After the quarter-final loss to Gulliver in 2016, she won again in 2017, beating Corrine Hammond 3–0 in a final in which neither player had dropped a set on the way. In 2018 she beat Dobromyslova 3–1 for the fourth title.
The other majors arrived alongside. She won the BDO World Trophy in 2015, 2016 and 2019 and the World Masters again in 2018 and 2019. The one that got away was the 2015 World Masters final, where she missed six match darts against Aileen de Graaf and lost. The full list is on the BDO women’s world championship page.
Her last two Lakeside championships both involved Mikuru Suzuki. Suzuki beat her in the first round in 2019 and in the final in 2020, 3–0.
Q School, 2020
Ashton had missed a PDC Tour Card at the 2019 Q School by one point. In 2020, weeks after that Lakeside final, she finished twelfth on the UK Q School Order of Merit and became the first woman to win a Tour Card there.
In March 2021 she beat Aaron Beeney 6–2 at the UK Open, the first match won by a woman at that tournament since 2005. Her 100.3 average was the highest by a woman on television. She had already set the televised women’s record of 98.85 at the 2016 World Trophy.
The card ran out after the 2022 world championship. Ashton has since won PDC Women’s Series events in every season from 2021 to 2026 and, in 2025, the Women’s World Matchplay, beating Robyn Byrne, Beau Greaves and Sherrock along the way. She has also played the World Seniors Championship, reaching the semi-finals in 2024.
