While the Olympic Games is going on in Tokyo, the ISPS Handa World Invitational gets the call-up to feature on the European Tour for the very first time. Shapeshifting is very much the name of the game on this tour, these days, so stay with me: it's at Galgorm Castle, which hosted the Irish Open last year, but this is strictly speaking the Northern Ireland Open, which also took place here last year, except on the Challenge Tour, although it's now back under the title used in 2019. Oh, and one round takes place at Massereene.
The reason for two courses and the name is that this is another event in which men and women compete on equal terms, albeit not against each other as was the case in Sweden a month and a half ago. No, these are events running in concertina, with alternate tee-times throughout the week. It's a fabulous initiative which among other things will tell young girls who want to be the next Steph Meadow that they can pursue a future in a sport not always known for forward thinking. If you're moaning about it, be quiet for a bit.
Massereene is a very short course which looks there for the taking even if the fairways are narrow and greens small, but three days at Galgorm Castle should help to keep a lid on scoring. Perhaps the rough won't be quite as juicy nor the weather as cool and damp as it was last October, when John Catlin stole the Irish Open from Aaron Rai, but it should still ensure that a measure of accuracy is needed. That's usually been the way here.
If you're in a hurry to watch the boxing or desperate to see if there's any more of that 3x3 basketball on Eurosport, feel free to depart at this point, because the case made for Chesters is basically repeated throughout my selections.
Next is SIHWAN KIM, who could extend the winning run of US golfers at this course to three if building on a progressive set of form figures.
Kim's sequence at the moment reads 61-37-23-10, and it's notable that excellent scrambling (15th or better in each, fourth last week) has powered these four cuts he's made. So too has finding fairways, as he's ranked 11th, seventh and 17th over the course of the last three, so at a lower level he boasts similar skills to last year's one-two.
In fact the one time he turned up with his game in decent order he did comfortably make the cut and hang around not too far down the leaderboard, so with the wind in his sails this time, expectations should be higher.
OLIVER FARR is next and behind Chesters, he'd be the one I'm most excited about.
Although yet to win on the European Tour, Farr is a three-time Challenge Tour champion and always under tricky conditions, a comment which applies to his EuroPro wins, too.
He comes here in really quite nice form, finishing 23rd and 14th among his last three starts and playing better than the bare result in Scotland, where he was 11th at halfway in a Rolex Series event. Farr stumbled on Saturday but fought back well for 59th place.
Also prominent in Sweden after the first round, his missed cuts either side in Germany were both narrow and he's plainly in better form than when 39th here last year, another event in which three of his four rounds were good enough to be competitive only for a third-round 76 to undo much of that good work.
Again we've Valderrama form — he actually contended on his sole visit but faded to 22nd under the huge pressure of playing for his card — as well as Diamond, where he's been seventh, while among his Challenge Tour wins came a narrow defeat of former Galgorm Castle winner Jack Senior, under really tough conditions.
Second only to Chesters in driving accuracy, above-average in scrambling, his approach play improved and the putter getting better through each of his last five starts, Farr gets to drop into this hybrid grade where he's more than capable of winning and he'll have been buoyed no doubt by Stuart Manley's victory in Austria a fortnight ago.
At his best, the 38-year-old finds fairways and scrambles well, occasionally lighting up the greens, and he's certainly capable of quality approach play as we saw when he was seventh at Diamond earlier in the year.
Seven-from-seven in cuts made at Valderrama and eighth on his very first try at Fanling, he's in the same sort of mould as Rai and Catlin, and there have been one or two signs both this season and last that he's capable of adding to a pair of European Tour wins earlier in his career. Both came in runaway fashion on largely tree-lined courses under conditions which others in the field found difficult, and the same goes for a pair of play-off defeats, too.
Last week, he shot 68-66 over the middle rounds at Celtic Manor, where he ranked second in driving accuracy, and from the first on Friday through to the 13th on Sunday dropped just one shot. Then came a rather calamitous end, which perhaps masks the fact he played really well for a good chunk of the tournament.
McEvoy was looking at a potential top-10 finish until dropping four shots in five and though he'd been on a lengthy run of missed cuts before that, in Ireland, Germany, Denmark and a couple of times elsewhere, he missed by one shot or two.
This is certainly his time of year, having won back-to-back titles at the end of July in 2018, and once more in July on the Challenge Tour, while 20 years ago he won the Irish Amateur at another parkland course.
That's largely because he is what he is at 38, but weekend rounds of 65-69 for 14th place in Wales give him a platform and it's a solid one given that he was 20th off the tee, 37th in approaches, 21st around the green and 26th in putting.
His iron play has in fact been good for a long time now, including when 28th despite a slow start at Diamond where he's made the cut on all six visits. Fifteenth on his debut at Fanling, where he shot two rounds of 65, is another encouraging form line and the fact compatriot Ricardo Gouveia won on the Challenge Tour last week doesn't hurt.
Posted at 1000 BST on 27/07/21
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