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Padraig Harrington blog: Dubai preview

By
PADRAIG HARRINGTON
,
PadraigHarrington.com

Published Thursday, November 19, 2009, 1:55 PM
Updated Thursday, November 19, 2009, 2:15 PM

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Padraig Harrington blog: Dubai preview | Irish Sport | IrishCentral




Read more: Race to Dubai, Dubai World, Dubai
Top European golfers, including Ireland's Padraig Harrington, are getting ready for Dubai
Top European golfers, including Ireland's Padraig Harrington, are getting ready for Dubai

The culmination of the inaugural Race to Dubai is upon us. The top 60 players on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai list qualify for the final event, the Dubai World Championship. I am coming into this week in 18th spot and no chance of winning the overall crown. However that doesn’t mean that I am not concentrating fully on trying to win this week’s tournament. This is my final tournament in Europe this year and I would love to sign off for the season with a win. I have been here in Dubai for ten days now, the first week being a family holiday. It was a week away from golf and I never even took the clubs out of the travel bag; it was all about taking it easy and enjoying the sunshine with my family. I must admit that the Monday was a struggle as it was hard to get myself out of holiday mode.

This week’s event, The Dubai World Championship, is being played on a new Greg Norman course called “Earth”. The course and the surrounding area is a new development that was only officially opened this week. We are pretty much the first people to play the course. I first came to Dubai in 1997 in my first season on Tour and back then there was very little development, but now it is a fully fledge city. In the years since then there has been huge development and now it is thriving city with many international companies having offices here.

The Earth course is a great test for the finale of the Race to Dubai; it truly is a championship course. It has plenty of length as it can be stretched out to 7,675 yards but it won’t play this for us as there will be a few tees pushed forward. The two main features of the course are the bunkers and the greens; the bunkers are very distinctive from the tee as they are big and deep and are very well placed. The greens are large with a lot of slope in them, with sections where they can tuck away pins. It is a course that no matter how much time you spend on it you would never get to know it all. There will be plenty of shots hit this week that players will be happy with and they will find their ball off the green and conversely there will be a lot of poor shots hit that work out. The one thing that is going in our favour is that the greens are soft and so it makes scoring quite a bit easier. If they were firm this would be a very tough test. I think that it is a very good course and I like what Greg has done with it. There is no real rough to talk about which is something that I like on a course, the test is not in hitting fairways but in getting the ball in the hole.

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