Harrington looks to bounce at the Barclays

PÁDRAIG HARRINGTON returns to competitive golf this week at the Barclays Championship, the first of four events in the lucrative, season-ending Fed-Ex Cup series on the US Tour.

While his fans are still reeling from the manner in which Harrington encountered golfing disaster at the 16th in the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and at the 8th in the USPGA Championship, his performances at Firestone and Hazeltine have fired him up the Fed-Ex Cup rankings table. Those nightmare holes aside, Harrington’s game should be in good working order and if he can avoid a repeat of such serious blips, he should be in contention for a substantial share of the millions on offer at Liberty National, New Jersey, this week.

“I will be a better player for what happened in those two tournaments, I have learned from them, and they won’t leave a bad mark of any kind on me,” insists Harrington.

And those who know the man best believe that is the case. He was in great form at Friday’s Desmond/Corr society wedding at Doonbeg and it was just the kind of occasion this workaholic needed to take his mind off the game.

He tackles the 7,400 yards Liberty National lay-out confident that all the work of the past couple of years is now paying dividends and that a big win is only just around the corner. If it is to come in the Barclays, though, he will have to deal with one of the strongest fields of the year, led by Tiger Woods as well as each of the major championship winners Angel Cabrera, Lucas Glover, Stewart Cink and YE Yang.

Also in the field are Phil Mickelson, still the number two ranked player in the game in spite of his off the course distractions and string of poor results, and Ernie Els, who has shown signs that his form is returning.

This week’s Barclays in New Jersey will be followed in successive weeks in the Fed-Ex series by the Deutsche Bank at TPC Boston at Norton, Massachusetts; the BMW Championship at Cog Hill, Lemont, Illinois, and the Tour Championship at East Lake, Atlanta.

The number of players in each field decreases from week to week so it is important for Harrington to figure prominently in each event if he is to be one of the elite 30 who qualify for the showdown in Atlanta.

Interestingly, Fiji’s Vijay Singh won the Barclays and the Deutsche Bank last year before Colombian Camilo Villegas walked off with the BMW and Tour Championship. Injury deprived Woods of the opportunity of playing in the series in ‘08.Though he has failed to capture a major title this year, he still has five tournaments wins to his credit and as always will be the man to beat over the coming weeks.

Harrington won’t lack for European company in New Jersey with Paul Casey (hopefully recovered from the rib injury that has kept him out of action in recent weeks), Luke Donald, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia and Justin Rose in the field.

With $7.5m (€5.2m)on offer in each of the four Fed-Ex Cup events, it is inevitable that all those Europeans who qualify will ply their trade in the US but it doesn’t augur well for the tournaments at the same time on their home circuit. Week in, week out, since the Open Championship, we have seen tournaments like the Scandinavian, Czech and Dutch Opens go ahead without the vast majority of the bigger names.

Much the same applies in the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles this week. Even though the likes of Lee Westwood, Henrik Stenson, Martin Kaymer and Miguel-Angel Jimenea are not playing in the States, they are still not supporting a tournament in prize money. The battle for places in the 2009 European Ryder Cup team begins in Switzerland on Thursday week and even then the majority of the leading players will be otherwise engaged.

IRISH fans, though, do have the involvement at Gleneagles of Peter Lawrie, who went so close in the KLM Dutch Open at the weekend; Paul McGinley, Damian McGrane, Shane Lowry, Gary Murphy and Gareth Maybin.

As things stand, though, mobile phone company ‘3’, the sponsors of the Irish Open, will continue to find it extremely difficult to find a suitable date for their tournament in 2010 and beyond. Their ambition is to play it on a links in the weeks immediately preceding the Open Championship. However, it is difficult to see that goal realised given that the Open de France Alstom and Barclays Scottish Open have the dates in question safely locked away.

Nevertheless, ‘3’ are insisting on moving their date out of May and this presents the European Tour with a problem given that the €3m the company put up in prize money this year was well in excess of most other tournaments on the circuit. Not only that, but the Irish Open is one of the biggest and most prestigious events on the calendar and deserves a slot that adequately reflects that position. These are tough times for men like George O’Grady and Tim Finchem, the chief executives of the European and USPGA Tours. The former has had to accept the unpalatable fact that the Race to Dubai prize money at the end of the year is down by 25% and the latter faces the task of finding replacements in 2010 for the two sponsorships recently dropped by Buick.