Course has changed since Tiger’s ’06 win

It is not just Tiger Woods who will have changed in the eight years since the Open Championship last visited Hoylake, the Royal Liverpool course he tamed in 2006 will be presenting quite a different challenge this time around.

Woods won his third and most recent Open here in ’06 during a season which had seen him come up short at the Masters — watched for the last time in a Major by his dying father Earl — then miss the cut at the US Open in the wake of his mentor’s death.

When he got to the seaside village of Hoylake, on England’s Wirral peninsula, a sense of peace had taken over his mind and he found a dusty, sun-parched links at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in the midst of a heat wave that helped him set about dominating the field by leaving his driver in the bag for all but one of the 72 holes.