Rory McIlroy (left) will take on Shane Lowry in the first round of the World Match-Play
Fearghal Donnelly | Contributing Writer
It’s that time of the year when the golf season truly kicks it up a gear. Until now, tournaments have mainly consisted of the ‘big guns’ on tour cleaning the dust off their clubs and sharpening up their games for what lies ahead. In the next three months, on the PGA Tour, we get to see the best in the game battling it out in the Accenture Match Play and Cadillac Championship – both World Golf Championships – and then the Masters at the start of April, not to mention the Honda Classic and Arnold Palmer Invitational before then, which have Rory McIlroy and the resurgent Tiger Woods as their respective defending champions. The next three months of golf promise to be something special, and it all starts with this week’s Accenture Match-Play Championship, which takes place in Dove Mountain, Arizona.
The match-play has the perfect niche in the golfing world, as the PGA Tour’s only match-play championship. It is the only time when the spectators get to see the best in the world go up against each other, mano a mano. Alongside the team based Ryder, Solheim, Presidents and Walker Cups, which are played in alternating years, we don’t get to see the psychological battle that goes on between two golfers, as they go head to head. The cliché “it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint” is particularly true in this tournament, as the greatest player in the game at the moment, Rory McIlroy, could get dumped out at any time, even in the very first round by his close friend, the Offaly-native Shane Lowry.
From an Irish perspective, this year’s first round, today, may prove to be the most interesting, as the four Irish players in the field: McIlroy, Lowry, Padraig Harrington and Graeme McDowell, are set to face off. This is McIlroy’s second tournament, after a poor performance in Abu Dhabi in January, where his new Nike clubs proved to be too big a change for him, and led to a missed cut. This should give Lowry some hope, knowing that he’s coming up against a rusty, out-of-sorts, world number one. As for the other all-Irish encounter, Harrington versus McDowell, one would have to imagine that Padraig, with a fourth and ninth place mixed with two missed cuts in a row has a slight advantage over his friend McDowell who, in his first tournament of the year – the Northern Trust Open in Riviera, California – missed the cut by a shot.
Elsewhere, possibly the greatest player of all time, Tiger Woods, plays against fellow American Charles Howell III, who has already three top ten’s in five starts this year. The pair meet for the first time since Woods defeated him in the 1996 US Amateur, and as they’re seventh and sixth in the Fed Ex Cup standings, this should prove to be one of the best matches of the tournament. There’s also the transcontinental affair of defending champion Hunter Mahan who will be trying to best the young Italian Matteo Manassero, with the defending champ having home advantage, and a top ten finish in his last start. With all this taken into account, this year’s staging of the event, and the truest starting gun of the golfing season, could prove to be one of the most eagerly-anticipated yet.
