The Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship is not easy to assess, a feeling enhanced by the absence of a South African event to precede it. Working out who will be at or close to their best following a break is always difficult, and I’ve often felt that the curious history of this well-established tournament – playing this year under the banner of Rolex Series for the first time – owes something to its place on the calendar.

Granted, the 2018 leaderboard could be labelled broadly predictable, Tommy Fleetwood having defended his title in style, but his earlier success was in some ways out of the blue. While Fleetwood had ended the previous year dropping hints wherever he teed up, he’d missed four cuts in five previous visits to Abu Dhabi GC. The lesson there is that if a course looks like it ought to suit a player, and they keep coming back, it often pays to be patient.

Rickie Fowler’s 2016 victory also goes against any notion of unpredictability, but it was the first time since Martin Kaymer’s third triumph, in 2011, that there was no real peculiarity to speak of. In 2012, Robert Rock downed Tiger Woods before his friend Jamie Donaldson got the better of Justin Rose a year later. In 2014, Pablo Larrazabal held off both Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy, while the latter proved vulnerable again in 2015 as Gary Stal was the chief beneficiary of a remarkable collapse from Kaymer.