Lesser men would have buckled, and possibly run for cover. Not Henrik Stenson. When the quirks of the Brabazon course turned on him in yesterday's final round of the Benson and Hedges International Open, the 25-year-old Swede - in his rookie season on the main tour - responded like someone who had been plying his trade on the circuit for years.

When he had a bogey, he immediately had a birdie. When he had a double bogey, he hit back with an eagle! So, a player who had started out on day one in 164th place on the Order of Merit finished the tournament as champion and occupying 10th place in the money list; and, also, in one fell swoop, he jumped from 129th to 16th in Europe's Ryder Cup table. In yesterday's final round, which mercifully finished just minutes before a thunder and lightning storm left the course flooded and the acoustics difficult for Stenson to fully describe what the win meant to him, he showed supreme character to finish with a 70 for a 72-hole total of 13-under-par 275, three shots clear of joint runners-up Paul McGinley and Angel Cabrera.

It was a mixed bag of a round littered with birdies, bogeys, pars, a double bogey and an eagle. All the way around, he looked at the leaderboards dotted around the course and was surprised no-one was making a charge at him. "I just tried to keep my own game going. I won three times last year on the Challenge Tour and that was really important and helpful to me," he admitted.

In fact, Stenson, who had started the day three clear of McGinley and Olle Karlsson, remained in control of his own destiny. Karlsson, like so many others, frittered away shots while McGinley and Angel Cabrera, who emerged as the real threats, never really got close enough except for a brief period when they were playing the infamous 10th, a hole shortened to 262 yards to entice players to have a go for the green.

While they were waiting on the tee-box, Stenson incurred a double-bogey six on the ninth hole after his approach found a green-side bunker and he only managed to extricate the ball to the top of the bunker. A chip and two putts later, Stenson was walking to the 10th tee-box with his score reduced from 12-under to 10-under par, just two ahead of McGinley and Cabrera.

McGinley stuck to his pre-round game plan not to go for the green and was dealt a cruel blow when his ball landed in a fairway divot. He drove a sand-wedge through the ball, found the green and then marked his ball so that Stenson, behind, could take his tee-shot.

The Swede's one-iron was pushed right, clattered through the trees, fell into the rough but bounced out to the first cut. "I thought he would be doing well to get up and down from there," remarked McGinley. Instead, after McGinley had two-putted for his par and walked to the 11th tee-box, Stenson proceeded to chip-in for an eagle. The ball took one bounce, hit the pole and settled into the hole. It was the decisive blow of the final round, and he added a further birdie at the 12th to give him an even greater cushion.

On the homeward run, McGinley did have a number of birdie chances but had difficulty holing the putts. He had to stay patient and he finally got his reward at the 17th where his second shot, a three-wood that was drilled 255 yards into the wind, finished 25 feet from the hole. The eagle putt missed, but he tapped in for birdie, and then finished in style with an eight-iron approach to 12 feet for birdie at the last.

Padraig Harrington's tournament aspirations had disappeared along with his lost ball on the way to a quadruple bogey eight on the 11th in Saturday's third round, but he finished with a final round 70 for two-under-par 286 to claim a top-20 finish, while Darren Clarke had a false dawn to his final round when birdieing the second and eagling the third only to squeeze in six bogeys before he managed another birdie at the 17th on his way to a closing 74 for 287.