Dodd relishes winning taste

It may have taken Stephen Dodd 166 events to taste victory on the European tour, but he has needed only eight more to show he is no one-win wonder.

The 38-year-old Welshman now has the Nissan Irish Open to add to the Volvo China Open he captured last November.

And as a result Dodd, 10 times a visitor to the tour’s qualifying school, now sits a proud fourth on the Order of Merit.

“Once I did it once I wanted to do it again,” he said. “Obviously I didn’t expect to win twice, but I have put a lot of hard work in and it has finally paid off.”

It is a quite stunning turnaround in the fortunes of the 1989 British amateur champion, a member of the first Britain and Ireland side to win the Walker Cup on American soil that year.

But while he now looks ahead to this week’s BMW Championship at Wentworth with his season a success story whatever else happens in it, spare a thought for David Howell.

Successive play-off defeats make Howell the circuit’s nearly man of the moment and since his victory in the 1999 Dubai Desert Classic he has now had no fewer than 35 top 10 finishes without winning again.

Last weekend in the British Masters, Howell stood one ahead with one to play, bogeyed the closing par three at the Forest of Arden, then did it again to lose to Thomas Bjorn at the second play-off hole.

Last night – it was after 8pm that the event finished following an earlier 90-minute storm delay – Howell birdied the final hole from 14 feet to match Dodd’s nine-under-par total, but then pushed a three iron into rough on the same par five and lost to the Cardiff golfer’s two-putt birdie.

“Nobody has beaten me for two weeks and I have nothing to show for it,” stated Howell. "Last week I was gutted, but this time I wasn’t. I was really pleased with how I finished.”