A week to remember in the desert. An event long standing on the European tour, now given a facelift under the DP rebranding, the Dubai Desert Classic gave us exactly that – a classic Sunday that has kick-started the season for many golf fanatics.
This excerpt will start at the end and work backwards. Alongside the pod brought out this week, this post will hope to peel back the layers to provide some extra insight in to the top performances this past week.
Beauty and the beast
In that theme, let’s start with the last two standing on Sunday afternoon; Viktor Hovland and Richard Bland. Games that couldn’t be more opposite if they tried.
Even their strokes gained radar plots look away from each other with disgust. Bland, a golf game from a land before time, oozing class, feel and touch, and Viktor, a modern machine built to destroy the rubber golf ball with ruthless efficiency.
Some points that are worth taking note of – Bland’s total of 2.34 SG putting per round is mind bogglingly good. Let me give you some context here:
Jordan Spieth (2019 PGA, 2015 Valero TX.) has only ever had two better putting weeks than that in his entire career.
Tiger Woods (2004 Wachovia Champ., 2013 Arnold Palmer Inv.) has only ever beaten that weekly putting total twice in the stokes gained era.
To be a top 5 player in the world you generally have to be 1.8 shots better per round than the tour average, and bland was blasting through that with just his putter. Seriously hot with the flat stick.
The flip side of this is, of course, we just witnessed likely one of the best putting weeks of the decade, and it still wasn’t good enough for an outright win. Hovland’s statistics are far more reconcilable, he gained near enough a shot and a half both off the tee and with his approach play, which is largely in keeping with a great week from an elite ball striker like himself. A small aside is that he was the only top-10 tee-to-green player to gain strokes putting.
Interestingly they both lost strokes in one category, Hovland (-0.28 ATG) has always struggled with chipping and pitching the ball, and Bland (-0.46 OTT) is giving up shots to the field in both driving distance and accuracy. Ouch.
There’s many ways to skin a cat week-to-week, but over the long run Hovland’s game certainly seems to align more with other top players.
The Bridesmaid
Rory Mcilroy, once the golden boy of the game, now a veteran spokesperson of the tour, doesn’t seem to come with the closing power you expect of someone with his experience.
The concrete
The objective outlook of Rory’s week is that he played pretty darn well. Really well actually.
As you can see, he gained strokes in all four categories, outplayed both playoff contenders in two of the four and generally presented a very balanced golf game. Some readers might be surprised to see his game matches up far closer with Bland’s than Hovland’s, gaining the majority of his strokes, 65%, through short game.
This is the unfortunate reality of Rory’s golf game in recent years; he is above average in all categories, but he is rarely exceptional enough to win big. This might seem a bit harsh on someone who is renowned as one of the premier ball strikers in today’s game, but the fact he only hit 46% of his fairways in Dubai is enough to offset the 27 yards he gained on the field in distance, and when he has weeks of driving the ball better, his approach play hasn’t stacked up to the Hovlands, Morikawas and Rahms of the world.
This is all relative to what it takes to win of course, he did gain on the field tee-to-green this week. But when it comes down to missing a playoff by one shot, the numerical outlook is; he simply wasn’t stellar enough in at least one category like the other two were.
Which leads to the harder question to answer, why?
The intangibles
A factual reflection on Rory’s week can only get us so far. So he didn’t drive it well enough, wedge it close enough, or hole enough putts. So did the rest of the field. The more pertinent question is, why? Well, we can’t step inside Rory’s mind, and I’m no Dave Alred, but watching Rory on Sunday was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster to say the least.
The pace of play was abysmal on Sunday. The leaders teed off at 7:46 GMT and Rory was standing on the 17th tee with driver in hand just before the 5 hour mark at 12:30. As noted, this is the subjective reflection of Rory’s week, but you’ve got to think for one of the faster players in the game, a five and a half hour round in the last group on a Sunday is enough to irritate anyone when things aren’t going their way. This boiled over a couple times with Rory snapping at some camera operators as he was coming down the homeward stretch.
Rory doesn’t have a stellar Sunday record in recent years either, of his leads (or tied leads) going into the final round in the last four years, he’s converted just 2/6 (2020 World Golf Championships-HSBC, 2019 RBC Canadian Open). Now, it’s not easy to win on the tour, and I certainly don’t want to paint Rory as succumbing to pressure, but I think the expectation we put on Rory was summed up pretty well by Hovland just half an hour before Mcilroy sprayed a 3 wood into the drink on 18.
“Rory’s a pretty good player, so I’m thinking he’s gunna close this one off, if not I’ll be ready to play him in a playoff, but.. looks like he’s got this one”
Yeah… that aged like milk. The expectation of someone with as much talent as Mcilroy is exceedingly high, especially given how prolific he was from 2010-2016, but the reality since then just hasn’t been the same.
The DDC
Increases in prize money and a slight rejiggle of the schedule have tried to attract more talent to this event. Rebranding the tour and the event under the Rolex series might give Hovland some more spending money and an extra jewel in his crown, but it’s done little to move the needle on the global stage from a skill perspective. The strength of field on the OWGR for this event has continued its marginal decline in the last four years, and it remains to be seen if more zeros on the pay check and thrilling finishes like we just saw can help turn this event into a legitimate competitor to the PGA Tour’s west coast swing.
