No Irish Challenge in Dubai Final

After 24 tournaments in 20 countries across the globe, the 2013 European Challenge Tour season will finally reach its climax at this week’s Dubai Festival City Challenge Tour Grand Final hosted by Al Badia Golf Club. Alarmingly for the second successive year the Grand Final includes no Irish players. The last being Simon Thornton in 2011. 

On that occasion Thornton finished tied 6th after a final round 64 in Puglia. This season Thornton became a European Tour winner after securing the Najeti Hotels et Golfs Open presented by Neuflize OBC title in Saint Omer in June.

Colm Moriarty was a Grand Finalist in 20101 but finished 31st and outside the top fifteen who get European Tour playing cards.

This year the Challenge Tour finale enters a new era as it moves to the United Arab Emirates city for the first time, and the Al Badia Golf Club will provide a fitting backdrop for the drama that is sure to follow this week.

Italian Andrea Pavan, a former winner of the Grand Final, sits atop the Rankings heading into the season-ender, but he will not be sitting easy as a number of ambitious young guns and experienced older heads attempt to steal his thunder and finish top of the pile.

While the race for the prestigious title of Challenge Tour Number One might catch many an eye, there is a lot more at stake for the majority of the field at the Dubai Festival City venue this week.

At the beginning of the season, every Challenge Tour player tees it up with one dream in mind – claiming one of the prized 15 cards for The European Tour. Now, it all boils down to one week and who has the guts, the unyielding ambition and the game to seal the deal when it matters most.

Nacho Elvira, winner of The Foshan Open in China two weeks ago, lies in 15th place on €72,830 and with a winner’s prize of €56,650 on offer this week, every player down to 45th placed Julien Guerrier (currently on €36,110) knows a win would be enough to fulfil their European Tour dream.

Every man has a chance and that point was emphasised in dramatic fashion last season when Englishman James Busby arrived to the Grand Final as the last man in the field, in 45th spot.

He launched a late assault on the leaderboard and in one afternoon, his career was turned upside down as a tied runner-up finish earned him an unlikely rookie season on The European Tour.

The winner of last week’s National Bank of Oman Golf Classic, Rooke Kakko, also proved what can be achieved as his first victory as a first professional (his previous Challenge Tour win coming as an amateur) earned him a guaranteed place in the top 15 of the Rankings – moving to sixth from 17th - and a return to the top tier.

Denmark’s Lucas Bjerregaard was the only player to leap into the all-important top 45 at last week’s penultimate event in Oman, thanks to a runner-up finish, and the 22 year old will be hoping to complete an incredible two weeks by making another climb into the top 15 with a big performance in Dubai.

The inaugural Dubai Festival City Challenge Tour Grand Final hosted by Al Badia Golf Club provides a fitting end to celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the Challenge Tour this year.

The tour has grown in strength and stature every year since its inception and to finish the 2013 campaign at such a spectacular venue as Dubai Festival City and Al Badia indicates how far it has come.

The event will also mark the beginning of a ‘Festival of Golf’ in the city as The European Tour’s DP World Tour Championship, Dubai hosts some of the world’s greatest players in two weeks’ time, before the emirate also hosts the final tournament of the Ladies European Tour season in December.

The Challenge Tour Grand Final has proven a real breeding ground for some of the world’s best golfers, with Thomas Björn, Nicolas Colsaerts, Martin Kaymer, Edoardo Molinari, Ian Poulter and Henrik Stenson having all played in the event before going on to worldwide fame.

Indeed, current Race to Dubai leader and World Number Four Stenson is a former winner of the event, his victory in Cuba in 2000 proving enough to secure the title of Challenge Tour Number One that season.

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Shane is Shanghai Alternate

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Shane Lowry sits in Shanghai over the next day or so as one of the alternates for the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions which gets under way this week with Henrik Stenson one of the names on the watch list. 

The Swede is scheduled for an MRI on Tuesday on a swollen right wrist that flared up while practising at home in Orlando

Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy are the Irish contenders in the field with both wanting to improve on last week's four rounds at the BMW Masters presented by SRE Group at Lake Malaren.

Although McIlroy arrives to the event boosted by a win having beaten Tiger Woods in an exhibition match at Mission Hills on Monday.

The course this week is the Sheshan International GC (West), a 7,266 yards, par 72 course and set amid 1,000-year-old gingko trees, manmade waterways and a natural quarry. The Nelson & Haworth design returns as host after a one-year absence when the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions went to Mission Hills. 

Sheshan International opened in 2004 as the Shanghai region’s first golf club and remains one of its most exclusive. Tiger Woods once called the layout “the crowning jewel of all of Asian golf.” To create the layout’s drastic elevation changes, work crews reportedly moved more than 2 million cubic yards of earth.

The new FedExCup champion Henrik Stenson and three reigning major winners join defending champ Ian Poulter in the 77-man field. Stenson is up to No. 4 in the Official World Golf Ranking after winning the Deutsche Bank Championship and TOUR Championship by Coca-Cola in the FedExCup Playoffs and with world No. 1 Tiger Woods and No. 2 Adam Scott sitting out, British Open champion Phil Mickelson is highest ranked player in the field at No. 3. 

U.S. Open winner Justin Rose and PGA Championship titleholder Jason Dufner also make the trip. Jordan Spieth, fresh off Rookie of the Year honors, tees it up for the first time in a WGC event. He took three weeks off after The Presidents Cup, where he went 2-2 as a Captain’s Pick.

Former U.S. Amateur champion Peter Uihlein also will make his WGC debut. He won a European Tour stop in Portugal last May.

Last year Poulter roared back from a four-shot deficit entering the final day with a 7-under 65, adding a stroke-play title to his Ryder Cup heroics less than a month earlier. No fewer than five different players topped the leaderboard in the final round, but the English pro proved steadiest in collecting another World Golf Championships title to go with his Accenture Match Play crown in 2010. 

The victory allowed Poulter to avoid just his second winless season since turning pro in 1995. Jason Dufner’s closing 64 highlighted a four-way tie for second, two shots off the pace alongside Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson and Scott Piercy.

This year even without Woods and Scott, the WGC-HSBC Champions has the strongest field of the PGA TOUR’s new fall start. 

The lineup features 15 of the top 25 players in this week’s world rankings with Stenson leading the European Tour’s money list entering its four-event Finals series.

Europeans have claimed the trophy in each of the past three years – Poulter, Germany’s Martin Kaymer (2011) and Italy’s Francesco Molinari (2010).

The final field contains 25 of the 2013 European Tour winners, 22 of the 2013 US PGA Tour winners, 40 of the world's top 50 ranked players and 23 Ryder Cup players with 66 appearances between them. The stellar field boasts 19 Majors, 12 World Golf Championships, 244 European Tour victories, 244 US PGA Tour victories and four players who have been ranked number one on the world rankings. T

he USA enjoys the highest representation in the field with 24 American stars hoping to join Phil Mickelson on the winner's roster, while England have ten players and South Africa, the third highest, with eight. There are six Chinese golfers in the field; Wu A-shun, Li Haotong, Huang Mingjie, Hu Mu, Liang Wenchong and Huang Wenyi.

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McIlroy Wins Mission Hills

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Rory McIlroy beat Tiger Woods by one shot in an 18-hole exhibition event in Haikou, China, to claim victory in the event for the second year in succession.

Woods had an opportunity to tie the match at the final hole but failed in a 20-foot eagle attempt to hand McIlroy the victory.

While the tournament is meaningless in all, bar the considerable appearance money on offer to both players, victory will come as some relief to the 24-year-old former world No. 1 after his recent travails. 

Despite the relatively relaxed nature of the event, he will be delighted with his form.

McIlroy struck eight birdies to Tiger's seven, while a double bogey at the fifth was cancelled out by two dropped shots from his opponent over the course of the round.

The Northern Irishman has spent the last few weeks in Asia, playing tournaments in Seoul and Shanghai, but he has been unable to come close to ending his long title drought.

The event in Hainan province was expected to earn McIlroy close to £1 million, per The Telegraph, with Woods earning well in excess of that figure as China continues to flex its financial muscle to attract major sporting stars and events to the country.

A relative non-event on the international golf calendar, the day was given major billing by the Chinese media.

Besides the round, the golfers were also involved in a skills demonstration with young Chinese prodigy Guan Tianlang, who, at age 14, played the Masters at Augusta last year.

McIlroy said afterwards: "I've seen a lot of promising signs over the past few weeks in practice and also in competitive play.

"I still have four tournaments left until the end of the season and I would love to finish 2013 strongly and get a little bit of momentum going into next season. But I think as I showed out there, I'm hitting the ball well."

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