Ten of the sixty competitors in the Dubai Invitational, the first tournament of 2024 on the DP World Tour, belong to the top 100 club worldwide. Well, seven of them monopolise the top ten of the tournament standings after 54 holes and with the final round to go. Among them, the two best, numbers 15 and 2 in the world, are also the first two on the leaderboard and will make up the star match of the Sunday round, as the most predictable canons dictate: Tommy Fleetwood (-15), who today has delivered a meteoric 63, and Rory McIlroy (-14), who stays up there thanks to a notable round of 67 strokes.
One takes a walk around the Dubai Creek Resort course and, at first, may not understand that the top ten in the standings are still in single-digit under par figures (the accumulated -8 with which Adrian Meronk closes this top ten), because it is a rather short course, with fairways that are not particularly narrow, a rough that apparently does not penalise severely and a wind that has hardly been a protagonist throughout the week…
Ah, friend, but the greens are another thing. The greens are really firm. Hard, brave. They are not tamed in any way. Maybe that’s why, who knows, in the end those players who according to the world ranking are more complete or consistent are up there. In any case, this seems to be a filter of more than notable excellence and to be taken even more into account in elite professional golf, although the necessary conditions to have the greens in this way cannot always be met, let’s not get too fussy either.
This new Dubai Invitational with such relaxed Pro-Am format (tomorrow, however, only the pros play), has been left with dreamy last Sunday matches, with Tommy and Rory in the star group, with Thorbjorn Olesen (-12) and Jordan Smith (-11) in the penultimate one, and with other guys like Thriston Lawrence (-11), Rasmus Hojgaard (-10), Yannik Paul (-10) or Adrian Meronk (-8) meddling in the last pairings.
It is not necessary to point out that with granite greens or without them, players like Fleetwood are capable of leaving some balls very close to the hole. Not to mention Rory. However, it is also mandatory to point out that the Englishman has today sunk a six-metre birdie putt, another of almost four metres and two more, watch out, of more than ten metres each… Be that as it may, anything that does not end tomorrow with a victory for Tommy or Rory would be surprising. The pulse, to start with, is between the two of them, although it is not necessary to remember the legendary ability of this sport to blow up any forecast, however logical it may seem.
No Spaniard has got into the definitive fight, although Adrián Otaegui (-6) has not been so far away with his card of 70 strokes today. In his hands, however, is to start the year with a shiny and buzzing top ten. The Basque is not far from that goal, who tomorrow goes out to play an hour and twenty minutes before the star match alongside Joost Luiten.
