THE STATS are bleak enough: after seven weeks of the competition roughly 22 per cent of our players have actually cost their managers points, rather than earning them any. Chris DiMarco and Mike Weir “lead” the way on that front, both players on minus eight after missing the cut at the Byron Nelson Championship.
Another 134 players sit on zero points, many of them yet to swing a club in anger at any of the tournaments in our schedule.
Only five of the men on our list – Matt Kuchar, Peter Hanson, Lee Westwood, Zach Johnson and Rickie Fowler – are in three digits when it comes to this points-earning business, and only 96 – out of 429 – are in double digits.
We can’t but marvel, then, at those managers who’ve so far avoided selecting the serial no-showers or cut-missers, none more so than Kieron Hyland who took over from Bryan Crowley as our overall leader in week seven, the first in the competition to break the 700-point barrier.
Granted, it helps if you pick players who are actually in the fields for our tournaments, but still, you could have a more than decent-looking line-up featuring, say, KJ Choi, Paul Casey, Retief Goosen, Ernie Els, Darren Clarke and Rory Sabbatini, and find yourself on -20 points. That’s not good.
Form is, it has to be said, is something of an issue too, so it helps if you know your stuff, like Lucan’s own Michael O’Shea, who walked away from the Byron Nelson with a more than reasonable 95 points, the highest score of the week.
Jason Dufner, winning his second tournament in a month (a hat-trick of triumphs after getting married between the two events), was O’Shea’s star man in Texas, with Ryan Palmer, Robert Garrigus and Jason Day’s top 10 finishes helping him hold off the challenge of 30 managers who won 80 points or more.
Dufner was largely responsible, too, for sending Kieron Hyland, who was our weekly winner a fortnight ago, to the top of the overall leaderboard; Phil Mickelson is his next highest points contributor with his share of seventh. And Hyland even survived the withdrawal from the event of one of his line-up, a shoulder injury forcing Joe Ogilvie to pull out on the Thursday morning.
Crowley also had Dufner and Mickelson in his team, but the rest made no impact at all, with both Adam Scott and Louis Oosthuizen doing more harm than good by missing the cut.
So, we’re a third the way through the competition, the middle phase beginning at this week’s counting tournament, the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. Remember, it’s a category two event, so double the regular points are on offer.
