It's been a hectic couple of weeks which has caused the latest blog posting to be a little later than usual! My apologies! Wentworth and Celtic Manor were the tournaments attended over the last 2 weeks.
After staying down at Wentworth all week I then went pretty much went straight to Celtic Manor for the practice days of the Welsh Open, hence the two for one blog!
BMW Championship
Wentworth as usual was a great event. The practice days were a little hectic which is the norm, as everybody to do with the golf business seems to be there. I know a lot of the players find it a little bit too much and there can be a lot of distractions during the week.
On the practice days I spent some time with Chris Wood, Joost Luiten and David Horsey who all played together on the Tuesday which helped me kill 3 birds with one stone.
Unfortunately Chris suffered from reoccurring back problem in practice and probably shouldn't have played. While not to be outdone Joost also pulled a muscle in his back which hampered his preparation. David however was fully fit, and after struggling with pace of the greens in practice and his distance control, went on to have another solid tournament finishing birdie, eagle for 7th place. A good practice session late on Wednesday gave him a better awareness of where his pace control was coming from and David commented this week in Wales his pace was excellent all 4 rounds of Wentworth.
It was also good to catch up Michael Hoey to congratulate him on his win in Madeira the week before. Michael has been working really hard on all aspects of his game and so it's always great to see people like that get the results as reward.
I also did some work with Darren Clarke. Darren has been working on a couple of drills all year with good effect, I gave him a new drill this week just to slightly change the feel and focus which he responded well too. The new greens at Wentworth though are quite a challenge and a lot of people were complaining how difficult they are to read. Darren also found this to be case with him. Hitting good putts but just not quite matching line and pace.
Saab Welsh Open
After watching the guys on the course at Wentworth it was off to Celtic Manor for The Welsh Open. It was great to be back there personally after having been part of the team at the Ryder Cup (as putting coach to Edoardo Molinari and Ross Fisher) It was looking very different without the vast crowds and tented villages, but it rekindled some great memories.
The greens however weren't very good. They look half decent on TV butt they roll really poorly. They bobble a lot and weave on and off line, so I imagine this week a lot of people will be complaining about their putting come Italy next week.
That's the difficulty about putting, it's a lot harder to be able to separate the controllables and evaluate clinically your performance than the long game. If a ball bobbles early on off line or weaves off the line to give you the impression it broke more, because it happens so quickly, it can be difficult to really get a feel for whether it is you making poor stroke on it, a miss reading, or its the green condition. The better we can become at understanding our strokes (and what may cause our misses) and the better we become at just focusing on the processes (taking each shot on its own merits) the better we become at being to handle such greens, that will if you let them, erode your self confidence and promote self doubt.
This week in practice I met up with Darren Clarke on the Monday to collect some data with the SAM puttlab, as we haven't done that for a while, just to evaluate how the work he has been doing has gone. We wanted to do that as far away from the tournament round as possible so he could concentrate on just preparing for the event without being too technical. The numbers were a lot better, the best they have been which is all credit to Darren. There is a lot less moving parts in his stroke and his strike and rotation has improved considerably as a consequence. For the practice days we just really concentrated on working on pace and green reading.
I also did some work with Ollie Fisher in Wales also. Ollie played much better tee to green last week at Wentworth but putted poorly which was a shame as he has been putting ok but just struggling a little with his long game. But he feels he is turning a corner with his long game and after watching a few holes in the practice round he did look like he was hitting it nicely. Ollie had just crept into a bad habit on his takeaway which was causing him to cut across his putts a little and also strike a little out of the toe.
Other students in the field were Simon Khan, Michael Hoey, Matt Haines, David Horsey and Thomas Bjorn.
Hopefully one of them will be lifting the Trophy come Sunday!
Some images from Wentworth
