Will Furyk calm Clarke and Mickelson’s aggressive strategy?
At 12.30 locally (6.30 in Ireland) it’s the tee time for Phil Mickelson, Darren Clarke and Jim Furyk, and as they say over here, ‘it should be a lot of fun’.
The common perception is that Mickelson and Clarke will be aggressive, pulling out the driver, defying the ankle deep rough and the 18 to 20 yard wide fairways.
Meanwhile, the canny, experienced Furyk will stick to the short grass, finding the greens with four or five irons while his partners chop out of the hay with a wedge before pitching on with their third. Furyk left with a birdie putt from 30 feet, Clarke and Mickelson struggling for par from about half that length. Will that scenario follow through?
It’s certainly possible, with the big Irishman weighed down by a stream of failures in the event which he attributes to being too cautious.
“The driver has been the strongest club in my bad throughout my career and I’m going to use it wherever possible,” he promises.
Mickelson doesn’t have to talk the talk for people to realise that’s the road he will go down as well. But, and it’s a very big but, lefty Phil has yet to win a major title in 43 appearances and whatever approach he has adopted over the years doesn’t seem to have done him an awful lot of good.
He was asked yesterday, How bad is the pressure to win a major and do you deal with it? Reasonable enough, I would have thought, but the best he could manage was: “I really don’t worry about it.”
Perhaps not. His wife Amy has just presented him a boy to go along with the two girls, his bank account is overflowing with the folding stuff, he enjoys a very high and popular profile in spite of his failure to count when it matters most. But do you really believe him when he claims he doesn’t worry about that elusive major.
I don’t. How could that be with a guy who has 21 US Tour titles to his credit and countless others, yet lacks the ultimate valediction of major winner. He won’t talk about it although he expands just a little where his approach over the next four days is concerned.
“I have played too conservatively in the last few Opens, I tried to be patient the first couple of days, trying not to be too extravagant.
“I think I may have to take a few more chances than I have in past Opens in an effort to close the gap, to get below par going into Sunday.”
With Clarke hell bent on a similar strategy, that should make for a lot of fun, at least through Thursday and Friday. After that, only God knows where either might be.
