CADDIE'S ROLE:I HAD just pulled into the car park of my golf club last Saturday for a game in the weekend singles competition. It is a rare luxury for someone who spends the majority of his life on the road and hopefully gainfully employed carrying someone else's bag on a Saturday, not my own.

On my second week on holidays at home I was actually settling into a routine of planning to play in the club competitions.

I felt normal, peeking into a world where the weekend came to many of my fellow members with a sigh of relief, it was playtime.

As I squeezed into a packed car park – it was never this full in boom time – my phone rang. It was my boss, Alexander Noren, calling from Stockholm, keeping me informed about the prognosis on his wrist injury which he had been carrying for much of our recent trip to the Far East and Australia but had become bad enough in our final event in Bali to warrant his contemplation of withdrawal from the event on Friday afternoon.

It had been hot, his wrist was sore and particularly painful at impact with the driver. Having hit three balls off the 16th tee in the second round we had a little chat walking up the fairway both wondering tacitly which ball we would find and what number we would clock up on the hole, nine was not unrealistic.

He actually found his first ball in an unplayable lie and miraculously made a par. This is what good players do, they salvage their round from probable disaster.

Alex decided to continue playing, went on to finish the tournament and had a putt on the last hole on Sunday to possibly force a play-off, confirming the wide-held belief on tour to “beware of the injured golfer”.

When a golfer has an injury it is a difficult decision for him to withdraw. With internal niggles, as anyone who has suffered with a bad back or a stiff neck will testify to, we are always hopeful of feeling better in the morning.

Hope can sometimes be the worst quality in man. Sometimes it is best to be realistic and take the break your body needs to recover.

This is essentially what we talked about walking up the 16th fairway in Bali. Our consensus was that at 26, Alex is young, he has a long year and hopefully a long career ahead of him, so why risk competing in what was a relatively obscure event and possibly compromise the rest of his year and more? Why, because he had a chance to win and, of course, that is why all these competitors play.

Of course we have had a couple of very recent high-profile cases of injuries with Tiger Woods and our own Pádraig Harrington last year which highlighted both the physical prowess and decision-making ability of both gritty major champions. The sight of Tiger limping around southern California in the play-off for the US Open last June would have left an observer, who knew nothing about golf, wondering why he was putting himself through it. Answer: because he is a competitor. Of course the result was another title and almost eight months off with surgery and rehab on the damaged knee.

Pádraig of course made the correct decision to play the British Open Championship last July despite carrying what appeared to be a serious wrist injury. Dealing with an injury questions not only your pain threshold but also your thought process about what damage you are doing yourself by playing through the pain. Golfers are one of the few sportspeople who can have a very long professional life-span; it is important not to be short-sighted.

Pádraig’s decision that “it will probably be all right in the morning”, in hindsight of course, was the right one as he not only competed but went on to win his second Claret Jug. My ex-boss Retief Goosen once played a round in an event with a broken arm, such was his tolerance for pain.

So as I listened to my boss tell me of the MRIs and X-rays and poking and prodding of Scandinavia’s finest physicians at his left wrist, I quickly realised that I may well become a permanent fixture on my club’s timesheet. My relatively new boss had been told by the experts it would need at least another three to four weeks before he could play again.

They fortunately came to the conclusion that although it was a limiting injury, the ligament restriction that he was experiencing in his left wrist was not a career-breaking problem, as long as he rested.

Not hitting golf balls for professionals creates many types of withdrawal symptoms. For a young Swede to be banned from the range for so long could result in him going cold turkey; it is an extremely tough ask.

It must be very frustrating for Alex, who had such a strong start to the year, to have to sit out for so long. It is also a relief that he does not have a serious injury. So for him it’s the couch and for his caddie it is time to slot into the weekend golf routine on the other side of the bag.