Haotong Li (-5) is the provisional leader of the Hero Dubai Desert Classic once the morning round of the first day has finished. The Chinese, it must be said, has sunk four good cigars from more than six meters away (some, from almost ten meters), a circumstance that, of course, helps a lot and that unfortunately for golfers is not usually common. Anyway, this extravagant player, who can be whatever you want, but never regular and consistent, has already won in this square, so let’s keep the due respect to his leadership and give him the benefit of the doubt (he missed the last 16 cuts in 2023, but last week he reached a good 14th place).
One stroke behind Li are currently, with the round finished, five players. Among them, two roosters like Adrian Meronk (-4) and Nicolai Hojgaard (-4) and a veteran like Soren Kjeldsen (-4), in addition to Richard Mansell (-4) and Sebastián García Rodríguez (-4), currently the best placed Spaniard in the table.
Everything pointed to the fact that among the most outstanding of the morning shift we would also have Rory McIlroy (-1), but the Northern Irishman finished his round at hole 9 with bogeys at holes 6, 7 and 8. Nothing too surprising. Exactly the same could be said of Brian Harman (-1), but the Open winner finished with a double bogey at 9. We will see them messing around at the top of the leaderboard, we have no doubt.
But let’s go with Sebas and his splendid round of 68 strokes. Today he may not have played golf as in the Final of the School, where at times it seemed -he says- that he was in the living room of his house with the Play controller in his hands. Or maybe yes. Maybe today’s merit is even greater on a Majlis course at the Emirates Golf Club that gives absolutely nothing away, with a severe rough and very fast and increasingly firm greens. The Madrid player was dressed in Tiger’s Sunday colours. Red polo and black trousers. “Well, I didn’t exactly do it on purpose, what I was clear about is that I wasn’t going to play with these colours during the weekend…”, he explains with sarcasm. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to combine Tiger’s colours to play well at this fourteen club game. “No, it’s not enough. There’s a lot of work behind it with David Castillo, with whom I started working at the Sotogrande tournament, with the approval of Pepín Rivero, my lifelong coach who is always there and will continue to be. My new caddie (he’s the Scot Greig Stanfield) is also helping me”. Whatever has to happen in the remaining days will happen, but today’s performance was not a toast to the sun, a fluke or an act of faith. At least, that’s what the Spanish player suggests: “for the first time in a long time I feel that I can be up there, that I can win a tournament, although I know that here it is very difficult to do so and we have only just started”, he concluded, trying to keep his feet on the ground, but unable to hide a spark in his eyes of pure satisfaction.
Today, he also managed a great bogey at hole 3, where he missed the tee shot and then was about to lose the ball after hitting the second shot, although they found it just at the three-minute limit. After this accident, however, he began to display a powerful and accurate game, increasingly confident and stable, and so on until the end, closing the round with a textbook birdie at 18. In that stretch of the last fourteen holes he was only going to miss two greens in regulation and on one of them, he also sank the chip for birdie (hole 11). In case there was any doubt.
