Consistency the key to McDowell improvement

GRAEME McDowell’s spectacular final round of 64 that shot him up to a tie for fourth in the French Open at the weekend means that Ireland now has three players in the top ten of the European Tour order of merit.

McDowell picked up €138,600 in Paris and has accumulated €738,521 for the season to date. After a decidedly slow start, he has finished seventh (Madeira), third (Portugal), first (Italy), second (Diageo) and now fourth in France. That's a remarkable level of consistency, while Sunday's 64 demonstrates that he can shoot low numbers when the mood grabs him and the putts begin to drop.

Moreover, he has begun to play himself into genuine contention for a place in the European Ryder Cup team at Oakland Hills in September.

He currently stands 12th in the European points list and 23rd in the world table. The top five in each automatically make the side.

The 25-year-old from Portrush is certainly on a roll and another boost is that he has qualified for the Open Championship at Troon in a couple of weeks, with all the points on offer there.

McDowell's vein of rich form recalls his fantastic amateur season of 2000 when he won just about everything, including the Irish Close and Youths Championships, the South of Ireland and the World Universities Championship. His level of scoring in some of those events was remarkably low, a point underlined by his ranking as the number one collegiate golfer in the United States during his time at the University of Alabama.

He won six out of 12 events in 1999/2000 and had a stroke average of 69.6 beating the previous best of Luke Donald and Tiger Woods.

He also played a lead role in Britain & Ireland's victory over the USA in the Walker Cup match at Sea Island, Georgia, in 2001.

It is well recorded how McDowell was playing in only his fourth European Tour event when he captured the 2002 Scandinavian Masters at Kunsangen, the club he represents on tour.

There was a bit of a valley period after that, at least partly caused by his desire to play in the US, where he felt very much at home as a student.

Caught between two stools, he suffered for a while but since returning full time to Europe, the graph has been on a constantly upward curve.

He still fancies competing in America, but for the immediate future his focus is on developments a lot closer to home.

As a consequence, he has improved to 10th in the order of merit, immediately behind Padraig Harrington (€771,507), who has shown some slippage in recent weeks, as has Darren Clarke (€860,707), who is now out to fifth as South Africans Ernie Els (€1,269,903) and US Open winner Retief Goosen (€1,203,230) continue to lead the way.

Goosen and Els have won the order of merit in each of the last two years.

Paul McGinley played very solidly in France at the weekend as he recovers from knee surgery and he stands 24th in the money list with €397,237.

It's not always easy to understand how the world rankings are arrived at.

For instance, the brilliant young Australian Adam Scott won the unfortunately named Booz Allen Classic on the US Tour at the weekend.

Having previously captured the hugely prestigious Tournament Players Championship at Sawgrass in March, one might have expected Scott to figure a lot higher than 13th and to have improved more than two spots after his victory in Washington.

Padraig Harrington remains in eighth spot while Darren Clarke has gone out a place to 15th.

Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III, Mike Weir, Retief Goosen, Harrington, Jim Furyk and Sergio Garcia

continue as the game's top ten, closely followed by Chad Campbell, Kenny Perry, Scott, Stuart Appleby and Clarke.

Whereas Clarke, Harrington, McDowell and McGinley, for a variety of reasons, have no worries about their Tour cards, the same doesn't apply to the other Irish regulars, Gary Murphy, Damien McGrane and Peter Lawrie.

Murphy and McGrane did their prospects a lot of good in Paris when they shared 18th place with, among others, McGinley, and picked up cheques for €35,600. Murphy and McGrane are now 83rd and 85th in the order of merit with respective earnings of €135,563 and €130,759.

The leading 115 players at the end of the campaign retain their cards for next season. In 2003, the last placed qualifier earned €165,079 and with prize money increasing all the time, the required figure this time round may be a lot closer to the €200,000 mark.

Meanwhile, Peter Lawrie, the 2003 rookie of the year, missed the cut by a shot in Paris and finds himself back in 93rd spot on €120,755.

We have reached the most important stage of the season with the next three tournaments on the schedule, the

European, Scottish and British Opens, offering a total of €12 million in prize money.

And with the €1.9m Nissan Irish Open coming hot on the heels of the British Open, the importance of the month of July will not be lost on the Irish contingent, no matter what their status in the order of things.