MATTHEW SOUTHGATE Our playing editor has ten European Tour top-tens, including a 6th at the 2017 Open and a 2nd at last year’s Dunhill Links
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fter an enjoyable festive period, it’s nice to be back in the routine of tournament golf again. I’m looking forward to the season ahead and optimistic about my game as I start my tenth full year as a professional golfer. I actually did a lot more practice in the off-season than I thought I was going to. I worked a lot on my short game, but to be honest, it didn’t really improve. I spent a lot of hours on it and it wasn’t really getting much better, which was a pain. I actually went to the range a few times, too – something I wasn’t really planning on doing. I didn’t expect to want to practise when I left the DP World Tour Championship, but I got the bug for it when I got home. I had a few swing thoughts I felt were worth investing some hours in, so I got stuck in. I had some really good sessions. Coming into the new year, I’m hitting it as well as I ever have. The week before Abu Dhabi, I went to Dubai and picked up the short game practice again, which I’d parked after not getting the results I’d wanted over the Christmas period. I’ve got a friend who plays on the mini tours, but his short game, and his understanding of the short game, is unbelievable. We spent hours on end at the European Tour Performance Institute at Jumeirah Golf Estates. I reckon I did 35 hours of short game practice and hit thousands of chip shots. My friend was quite demanding and it was good to get that intense practice in ahead of my first tournament of the new year.
greens and my putting is as good as it’s ever been, so if I can get my short game back to where it was a couple of years ago, good things could be on the horizon. It’s been a good off-season. I’m often asked about goals for the year ahead, but I don’t generally set them. I always find it’s a bit of a dangerous thing. I’ve found in the past that if I set a goal and then achieve it quicker than I expected, I take my foot off the pedal a little bit. If I say my goal for the year is to win a tournament and I do that in January or February, I’m not going to quit for the rest of the season, am I? The goalposts move so quickly in professional golf that it’s very difficult to know what a realistic target is. I feel like if I play really well I could be on the fringes of Ryder Cup contention, but do I want to set that as a goal? It’s a lofty ambition and if I don’t achieve it, there’s a good chance I’m going to end up disappointed. If I set the goal of making the DP World Tour Championship and do it comfortably, but narrowly miss out on a Ryder Cup berth, I’m going to be raging – I’m not going to be happy about qualifying for Dubai. Similarly, if my goal is to win a tournament and I do that, but then three-putt on a 72nd green to lose another one, I’m not going to say “Oh well, I won another event so it’s fine.” This game is already hard and you don’t need to make it harder on yourself. I just try and take each shot as it comes and each tournament as it comes. What it really boils down to is control what you can control, work hard and apply yourself in the right way. You can’t ask for much more than that.
Illustration: Peter Strain
“The goalposts move so quickly that it’s difficult to know what a realistic target is”
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I think it’s common knowledge that my short game has been holding me back recently, but in the desert I hit certain shots around the greens that I’ve not really had in my armoury over the last year or so. It’s strange – you have to hit good shots to get confidence, but you have to have confidence in order to hit good shots. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Technique is so important with chipping and that’s what I’ve been working on. There were times last season where I hit a chip to tap-in distance, but I knew it hadn’t come out of the middle of the clubface and I knew my technique wouldn’t hold up under pressure. I’d rather hit a chip to six feet but have it come out of the middle, as you can then improve from there if you carry on working at it. You need a sound technique to get to a position where you can chip more naturally, and I definitely feel I’ve made progress in the last few weeks. I’m driving it as well as ever, hitting more
