Alejandro del Rey (-9) was bitterly regretting on the green of hole 18 at Leopard Creek this Monday, on the final day of the Alfred Dunhill Championship, postponed on Sunday due to bad weather. He had just missed a birdie putt of about four meters. The anger, however, was not so much for that putt as because he had caught this complex par 5 in two and was leaving without booty due to a three-putt. There he was missing a valuable top 5. This has been the constant feeling of this last day. Conditions have not been easy, but Alex thinks he could have subtracted something more from the field. He leaves without all the harvest that his game had deserved.
Be that as it may, Del Rey does not leave South Africa unhappy, far from it. He finished the Alfred Dunhill Championship in seventh place, which is the second consecutive top ten of the Madrid player after the fifth position of the previous Sunday in the South Africa Open. This is an absolute milestone in his career, to mark it in red.
This is the first time that Alejandro has linked two consecutive top tens in the DP World Tour. He has achieved it in tournament 39 of his life on this circuit. He did it three times on the Challenge Tour, one of them, in 2022, managed to chain three in a row (Scotland, Czechia and Empordà). The challenge of the two consecutive top 10, check. In addition, he is very well placed in the Race to Dubai and in the Opening Swing, although he will not have any chance of winning it, as it closes this same week in Mauritius, where Del Rey is not going to play.
However, the Spanish golfer has conquered a second even more valuable milestone if possible than the two consecutive top 10. It is the second consecutive week that he does not commit a double bogey or worse. He avoided them in the South Africa Open and has done it again in the Alfred Dunhill Championship. The value of this data is tremendous, since Alejandro had not done it so far in his entire career, neither on the Challenge Tour nor on the European Tour. Never until today had he accumulated two consecutive tournaments without making a double or worse. In fact, between the first and second division he adds 76 tournaments and has only been left without making high numbers on nine occasions, six on the DP World Tour and three on the Challenge.
The matter has even more value when it turns out that Del Rey had proposed it as a great goal to achieve in this new season. He told it in Ten Golf. He wanted to avoid the big numbers, or in other words, chain errors. He has achieved it in the last two weeks. “I’m happy about that and now what I have to do is continue in this line,” he confessed just after finishing in the tournament. By the way, to observe more closely the good evolution of the golfer from La Moraleja. Last year on this same field at Leopard Creek he made four double bogeys and a triple bogey. Evolution. Del Rey has finished today with a card of 70 strokes. Of the ten rounds played this new season, seven have been below par and four below 70 strokes.
In addition, Manu Elvira (-3), the other Spanish player who made the cut this week, has finished with a card of 73 strokes, final position 32º. Another notable performance from the Cantabrian.
