So the British Open at Royal Lytham & St Anne's gets underway tomorrow morning. Who will win?
My top three picks:
1. Lee Westwood
2. Padraig Harrington
3. Francesco Molinari
Dark horse: Nicolas Colsaerts
The rough is sounding like an issue so i am going to base my selection on driving accuracy and greens in regulation.
European Tour
Can anyone fix the mad spacing on that?
Based on the charts (which dont offer as much guidance as i had hoped) I will probably back the following e/w 1st 6 places on skybet.
F Mollinari, Westwood, B Watson, Curtis, McDowell, Mahan, Garrido, Oosthuizen, Drysdale. Maybe a punt on Poulter or Garcia
Will whittle that list down depending on the prices.
Cheeky 10p e/w on de silva @ 1000-1, miles ahead of everyone in the driving accuaracy stakes. Must be crap at pitching or putting or something.
As Woods said, the rough is horrendous. Going in there will as often as not cost a player a shot. The fairway bunkers are equally daft.
I think a steady-Eddie sort of player who nails fairways will win.
For the home chances, I'd go Donald, Westwood & McDowell.
For t'forriners, Zach Johnson, Jason Duffner and perhaps KJ Choi
An outside bet for me would be Branden Grace - he'd be only the latest South African to seemingly come from nowhere and grab glory.
Shite. Woods looking back to form. Boo!
Westwood having a roller-coaster round so far. Rose already out of contention by the turn, whilst Darren Clarke is, as expected, not putting up much of a defence of his crown.
PS - I put £1 e/w on each of McDowell, Zach Johnson, Duffner, Luke Donald & Choi. Got some good odds, too. Just hope they're all there or thereabouts to enhance my interest on the last day!
Edited by user 19 July 2012 11:58:38(UTC) | Reason: Not specified
Peaked far too early again - IMHO of course.
So the British Open at Royal Lytham & St Anne's gets underway tomorrow morning.
The what?!
It's "The Open" - nothing more, nothing less.
You can't right anyone off of course, but if the weather stays as benign as it is and the course keeps playing this easy then the likes of Westwood et al on level par are already too far off with so many top players at 4,5,6 and even possibly 7 under.
Hope I'm wrong as I'd love Westwood to win but he has given them such a great lead on such an easy day
At one point, out of my five bets, three were in the top 8, with the other two yet to tee off.
Still got GMac & Johnson in the top 4, despite Dufner dropping back to par
I've got Johnson on -5; McDowell -3; Donald, Dufner & Choi level.
At least my bets are all alive after R1!!
It's been a real issue for both Darren S and myself, in fact anyone trying to post tables, but apparently there's no fix right now
he certainly looked very focused yesterday and I can see him chipping away each round at any lead, my one reservation is I'm not sure he can go really, really low at the moment if someone does get out front
Donald going well this morning, four birdies in five holes and he is 3 under thru 8
Who's this Bradt Snedeker???? And, more importantly, WTF is he doing tearing the course up like that?
Hopefully he won't be able to sustain it and fall back. He's American, and the only American's who I could ever sanction winning the Open are ones I've had a bet on.
Scoring seems to have been trickier today, with the only notable upwardly mobile movers near the leaderboard being Mulroy (-3 for the day, -2 overall) & Simon Dyson (-3, -1)
A fair few going in the other direction, most notably McIlroy (+4, +1); Colsearts (+7, +2); Mickelson (+7, +10) and Cabrera (+11, +12). Poor Paul Casey, after being something like -3 after 12 yesterday, continues his nightmare slide with +9 today, putting him on +11 overall.
Still, yesterday's morning starters are still to get into their rounds.
Snedeker really has his putter dialled in at the moment. If he keeps going like this it is his tournament to lose. He's yet to card a bogey!
Quote of the tournament so far came from Darren Clarke yesterday. After his round, he quipped, "How the f*** did I manage to win this last year?"
Top bloke