Schedule driving Volvo crazy

AS Irish Open sponsors “3”continue their search for a suitable date for the Irish Open in 2010 with their preference currently heading towards the August weekend, they may take some consolation from the unfortunate situation in which another big spending European Tour sponsor, Volvo, find themselves.

The car giant is seeking to put together a field worthy of their new-look World Match Play Championship at Finca Cortesin on Spain’s Costa del Sol at the end of the month. Volvo funded the highly prestigious season-ending Volvo Masters from 1988 to 2008 when the Tour announced that it was to be superseded by the more lucrative (although by not quite so much now after the recent announcement of a 25% cut in the prize fund) Race to Dubai.

Undaunted, Volvo instead opted to take up the mantle of the World Match Play Championship which had finally run out of sponsors having been supported since its inception in 1964 by such companies as Piccadilly, Colgate, Suntory, Toyota, Cisco and HSBC. The tournament’s list of champions was like a whose-who of the game: Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Mark O’Meara (who beat Tiger Woods in the final).