Last week I appeared to break even, with a lot of ups and downs all cancelling each other out, so cumulative blog gain is still +£137. Looking forward to this Thursday:
Alfred Dunhill Championship 2009
Looking at the stats from the event in 2008, it was heavily dominated by the longest hitters in the tournament. Also, the 2006 tournament was won by the long hitting Alvaro Quiros. However the 2007 one was less dominated by long hitters, and GIR seemed more important. This leaves me wondering whether there was a change in set up last year (shorter rough?), which could be partly correlated with the fact that the winning score was much lower in 2008 than in 2007.
So should I be biased towards long hitters this year? No idea. The other areas I have been looking at are the successful Euro PGA tour qualifiers from the 2009 Challenge Tour and the Qualifying School. The best of these often do well in the events with weaker fields at the start of the year, such as this one (like Horsey, Willett and Cabrera-Bello last year).
Overall I will lean towards the long hitters but not exclusively so. Last, it does seem that certain players have more success in South Africa than others, and it is not surprising that African players themselves are the ones who seem to thrive. There are a core set of quality young African players at the moment and I will be including them in my tips.
I am going to split my choices into 3 groups based on big names, maybes, and outsiders:
Big Names - The South Africans Els, Oosthuizen, Aiken, and Schwartzel must all have good chances and fit my outlined profile. I won't include Sterne here due to his erratic recent form. Last person for this group is Eduardo Molinari who is playing very well. I am not going to back Els as his quoted finishing position of 15 looks too low given some inconsistency in his season.
Maybes
Cabrera-Bello, Drysdale, Maybin, A.Hansen, Otto. I think Otto could do well here - he won in Namibia a couple of weeks ago and came 29th at this venue last year.
Outsiders who could make Top 20 with luck
I will quickly list a few that I might back for Top 20 places - Van Zyl, Whiteford, Mclean, Fichardt, Dixon, Delamontagne, Davies, Colsaert, Cayeux, Boyd, Canizares, Andersson
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