With 70 per cent of the players on the Golf Masters' list in action in week eight, compared to 55 per cent last week, and a good proportion of them playing for bonus money at the BMW PGA Championship, we were expecting some significant movement in the upper reaches of our overall leaderboard. It wasn't to be. Indeed, David Creanor proved to be our biggest climber, rocketing from ninth to fifth.
All 10 of our leading managers, then, scored sufficiently well to hold their positions, none more so than Eamon Murray, whose Heroes 3 line-up yielded him a tidy enough sum, 156,625 to be exact, moving him within striking distance of our leader, Ian Baker from Clonee, who has a 110,000 advantage over his closest challenger.
None of the top 10, though, came close to matching Robin Heather's week eight total of 302,400, the bulk of those earnings contributed by Anders Hansen and Rory Sabbatini, the winners, respectively, of the BMW PGA Championship and the Crowne Plaza Invitational, both in play-offs.
If Justin Rose felt down after losing out to Hansen at Wentworth, Robin, from Wicklow Town, is entitled to feel even more aggrieved given he was the only manager to have both winners in his line-up . . . but still didn't earn a fourball in Druids Glen.
That prize was snapped up by Golf Masters debutant Ray Treacy of Rush, Co Dublin. And yes, we checked. No, he didn't play football for Ireland, and "no," he confirmed, "I don't, unfortunately, own a travel agency."
What Ray didn't possess either, when we spoke to him, was the pin number for his Treacy's Tee Offs line-up, having mislaid it during building work, so he wasn't aware he'd seen off the weekly challenge of a host of managers who've been Golf Mastering for nigh on a decade now.
"Beginner's luck," he insisted, and beginner's luck is, he reckons, what he'll need when he takes on Druids Glen. A relative newcomer to golf, Ray has been attempting to get to grips with the game at Deer Park in Howth, and will be intensifying his practice sessions ahead of that trip to Wicklow.
Aside from Hansen and Rose, Ray was also the beneficiary of a good weekend's work by Tom Lehman, joint fifth at the Colonial, and two more top-20 finishers at the same tournament, Jeff Maggert and Justin Leonard, with Paul McGinley and Steve Elkington bringing his team total to the 373,750 mark.
It won't trouble Ray too much to learn that Sabbatini is taking a fortnight off after five consecutive weeks in action, but it will come as grim news to 642 Golf Masters' managers that our 12th most popular player, David Duval (this status may have something to do with the fact he is priced at 500,000), has turned down his sponsor's exemption for the Memorial - where he has never missed the cut in 10 starts - and has, like John Daly (in 280 of our teams), withdrawn from the tournament.
Duval's earnings, then, after week nine, will remain at . . . zero.
If, alongside Duval and Daly, you have Ian Woosnam in your team - he's withdrawn from the Wales Open as he continues to battle "post-viral fatigue syndrome" - we can say only . . . oh dear.
