TIGER WOODS, the man who is never without a plan, arrived here yesterday in pursuit of his first major championship victory of the year and took two holes – or to put it another way, one lost ball – to unlock the secret winning the 2009 Open Championship.

“I think he realised what is obvious to a blind man,” surmised the RA’s chief executive, Peter Dawson, who walked two holes with the world No1 as he played the Ailsa course for the first time in his life. “You need to keep the ball in the short grass.” Woods, as is his habit on such occasions, was more curt. “The course is in great shape,” he said, before stalking off to the car park with his caddie Steve Williams in tow after taking four-and-a-half hours to play 18 holes.

Much of that time was spent stalking the greens, hitting one-handed putt after one-handed putt (53 on the second green). He lost a ball at the second hole, hitting his tee shot into the right rough, and thereafter hit his driver only twice, at the third and the par-five 17th.

Still, Woods, or indeed anyone else nursing hopes of victory on Sunday evening, knows exactly what is required.

He, or indeed they, will also have to control their ball flight like Lee Trevino, hit their irons like Jack Nicklaus, chip like Jose Maria Olazabal and putt like Bobby Locke. In other words, they will have to play like the championship golfer of the year.

That is exactly how it should be at the British Open, and exactly what many expected of Turnberry, a terrific golf course whose absence from the championship rota for 15 years seems bizarre.

The weather off the Irish Sea has the potential to wreak havoc but on the evidence of a blustery, occasionally sunny Sunday afternoon, the RA appears to have produced to stern but sensible test. The fairways are broad, the greens fast (ish) and the rough – which has been talked up by many, Colin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington among them, as the closest thing to penury this side of San Quentin– is not as ridiculous as had perhaps been feared.

Make no mistake, it is wrist-breaking in places, but those places are a distance from the centre of the fairway – in part because the organisers took the decision three weeks ago to widen the semi-rough. If conditions are hard and bouncy, as they almost certainly will be, that will stop some balls disappearing off into the jungle.

“We have widened the cut sections of rough a little bit on each side. Six yards rather than the usual four and a half yards, which is what we had a little while ago,” said Dawson. “It is very nasty off the fairway and off the shorter rough but the fairway and shorter rough is, I think, fairly generous. We don’t want to get the reputation that the Open is about hacking out of rough because it isn’t about that.

“We don’t doctor rough. We take what we get naturally and leave the playing arena at a sensible level. If you spray it outside the playing arena here, it is lost ball; hack-out territory.”

There was no disagreement on this from the players playing practice rounds yesterday although, as is always the case with professional golfers, there were more opinions than on a disagreeable day at United Nations. Some judged the course to be fair, generous even; others looked like they had endured a close encounter of the unpleasant kind. David Howell, a former Ryder Cup player who has been struggling with his game in recent months, was firmly in the latter camp.

“It is the best conditioned Open course I have ever seen but it is tough,” he said. “It is not Carnoustie in terms of straight-forward difficulty, or in the way the rough was in 1999, but it is a proper difficult golf course. There are no obvious birdie opportunities, the rough is up. The fairways – well, they are not single file but they’re not double file either. You stand on the tees sometimes and all you can see is hay. Other than that, I’m really looking for to playing it.”

In contrast to Howell’s good-natured pessimism, there was Henrik Stenson’s good-natured optimism. The Swede, who won the Players Championship and is ranked seventh in the world, has to be considered one of Europe’s best chances of producing a winner. Potential winners don’t do downbeat on the eve of the big event, and Stenson didn’t.

“The course is lovely, fabulous, although the lighthouse is smaller in real life than it looks in the photographs,” he said, brushing aside the opportunity to wax un-lyrical about the rough. “Sure, it is deep in some places, but the fairways are fairly generous.”