Martin Kaymer’s stunning finish to land the WGC-HSBC Champions tournament in Shanghai at the weekend just shows how tough it is to win on the European Tour.
Week in, week out, players are shooting low scores and putting together fantastic rounds and it means no-one can scrape their way to a victory – you have to play well over all four days of competition to earn it.
That’s the standard at the moment and it speaks volumes for the strength of the European Tour that we have the likes of Luke Donald, Rory McIlroy, Lee Westwood and Kaymer holding down the first four places in the world rankings.
I watched the last few holes of the champions event on local TV on Sunday and saw Kaymer birdie the final four – he birdied nine of the last 12 holes in total – on his way to a last-round 63 which brought almost £900,000 in prize money.
That’s some going, but it does indicate, I think, the level of performance which is required every week to be successful now on the European Tour. The standard is incredibly high.
Temperature
I arrived in Singapore on Saturday afternoon ahead of this week’s Barclays Open and by the time you read this I’ll have played 45 holes in an effort to get acclimatised to the humidity and heat over here. I got a round in over the more difficult of the two courses we play this week, on Sunday, and then played 18 holes over the second course yesterday. I planned to play nine more today before getting down to some practice ahead of Thursday’s start.
While the temperature has been in the 30s over the weekend it’s not as hot as I’ve experienced in this region before, but the humidity is something else really. I’ve had my sun block on while playing the two rounds I’ve already got in – you have to re-apply it after nine holes for it to be effective though – but it’s so sticky that you still feel a bit burnt afterwards, or at least I did.
My caddie, Simon Bell, seems to be coping so far and he has had experience of these sort of conditions when he played in the World Boys Championship in Japan. However, I’ve already warned him that it will be hotter and more humid next week in Malaysia – this is just the warm up! Almost literally!
Regular readers of the column will know I prefer it to be warm rather than cold so I’m in my element, and as long as I drink plenty of water the humidity shouldn’t be a problem. It does mean, though, that playing lots of rounds before the tournament gets underway is not a great idea, so my thinking was to play nine holes today and then get some serious practice in.
As I said last week my iron play had been poor for the previous fortnight on the Tour but I did some work my coach Mark Moore up at Wike Ridge last week and, touch wood, it has been getting better since we arrived in Singapore. I want to get some practice in, though, because it’s different playing shots during a round and actually working on things on the practice ground and it’s important to nail things down in your mind before competition starts.
It was good to have last week off and to have the chance to iron out a few things with Mark, but I also got to a couple of gigs last week in a complete break from my normal pre-tournament and season routine.
I enjoyed the Noel Gallagher concert at the Roundhouse in London last Monday but, of the two I went to, I have to say the atmosphere was probably better at the MEN for the Arctic Monkeys’ concert.
I think it was purely down to the venue being bigger really, but I wasn’t disappointed by other act. I’m an Indie music fan, as I’ve said in the past, and I’d certainly buy tickets to watch both Noel Gallagher and the Monkeys again. On the food front I’m pleased to report that after my food poisoning problem in Portugal a couple of weeks ago there’s been no repeat.
But, just to make absolutely sure, I was playing it safe this week and Simon and I plumped for good old-fashioned fish and chips for our tea on Monday night! It might not have been Harry Ramsden’s standard but we got stuck in all the same! When in Singapore...