The Volvo China Open returns to the DP World Tour schedule after five years away and even that wasn't quite enough time for Mikko Korhonen to ready himself, the 2019 champion having only recently returned to action on the Nordic Golf League.
It has however been long enough for Genzon GC to rebrand, henceforth known as Hidden Grace Golf Club, but not much else has changed. This is a mid-length par 72 which will again play soft after plenty of recent rain, and there's no denying that the weather, scorecard and leaderboards combine to offer mixed messages.
Korhonen is, in essence, a bit of a plodder. Fairways, greens, a decade to fall over the line, and so on. He beat Benjamin Hebert, a fairways-and-greens merchant if ever there was one, and in third place was Jorge Campillo, who is Korhonen but Spanish. He too took an age to win but has made a fine career out of doing everything just fine.
Two years earlier, when the Shenzhen International was played here, Bernd Wiesberger beat a charging Tommy Fleetwood in a battle of the flushers. Those two are both winners at Le Golf National and again the main message is that in behind them, you find the likes of Gregory Bourdy and Fabrizio Zanotti as well as a couple more winners of the Open de France.
But then there's Alex Levy, who brings a different kind of French flavour to calculations. He's the golfer people call swashbuckling for reasons I understand but could never explain. When he won here, with Fleetwood second, Alvaro Quiros finished third. And on the face of it, four short par-fives plus two short par-fours and a whole load of rain ought to give the powerhouses plenty to feast on, more so than last week in Japan.
You can certainly make a case for Alejandro del Rey, who buckles his swash like Levy and drives it like Quiros despite being a third of the size, and I almost did. Yet I can't shake the idea that this course is actually about being sensible, tidy, precise. The 1-2-3 in 2019 made 14 bogeys between them and that is how they separated themselves, which they really did in the end.
There are some options at the top of the market who offer a charming blend of tidiness and explosiveness, however, and none more so than TOM MCKIBBIN, who is a winner waiting to happen.
Seven top-25 finishes in eight starts so far this year demonstrate a player who has taken all he learned during a fine rookie season and will now go on to achieve his goal of joining mentor and club-mate Rory McIlroy on the PGA Tour in 2025.
How much McKibbin will draw from seeing McIlroy and Shane Lowry team up to win the Zurich Classic of New Orleans I don't know, but the case here is far more simple than that. He's the best player in this field already, I think, and the icing on the cake is that the course could be a really good fit.
On that we're guessing a little, but McKibbin's blend of accuracy and power takes care of any concerns about soft conditions, and I certainly feel it's better for him than Gotemba in Japan. There, he had two par-fives to go at and would've had to club down on occasion. Here, he should be able to grab the driver over and over again.
Wiesberger has made five cuts in six, only narrowly failing to do so in India, and four of these have been top-25s. It's been a light schedule for the Austrian, back from a LIV Golf jaunt which made him wealthier but was never likely to suit, and he's got straight back into pounding greens for fun.
We know by now that the putter can be the problem and he might need his season's best, but at least he now returns to a course where he held off Fleetwood to win in 2017, then returned at the beginning of his comeback from injury two years later and, at a time when he'd been struggling, finished 14th.
"I said to my caddie it feels like a course that suits me and suits my game," was his early takeaway en route to victory in the Shenzhen International and it absolutely does, largely because of that point around avoiding costly mistakes. Holes 13 to 18 in particular are dangerous, drawing parallels with Le Golf National, and that's always going to be the style which suits him best.
Consistently among the best on the circuit in the bogey avoidance charts, as with Wiesberger that's a reflection of his fairways-and-greens game, where smaller misses make scrambling that bit easier for the most part.
Ramsay has been showcasing that game for most of the season and while not quite in the form he showed around the time of his 40th birthday last summer, he's made 24 of 26 cuts since over a 52-week period, the sort of consistency which goes a long way at this course.
I thought 30th in Japan was very solid and while Gotemba was a good fit on paper, it was still new to him as have been a couple of courses this year. Hidden Grace on the other hand is not: he's played here five times, never finishing worse than 32nd, with the other four all top-25s.
The Bullet is a proper, old-fashioned ball-striker whose win, like McKibbin's, came under tough conditions at Green Eagle. If he's to double up, I suspect it'll be at a course where he can avoid the sort of errors which catch others out in the end.
He was 21st here on his sole previous visit back in 2017, shooting two weekend rounds of 68, and that performance can be upgraded given that he'd gone MC-MC-MC-45-WD-66 to begin the campaign, shooting rounds of 83, 76, 70, 76 and 79 before arriving at Hidden Grace.
Perhaps the return to China had something to do with it, as Armitage secured his sole Challenge Tour win at the Foshan Open and later went on to finish runner-up in a similar event at that level.
Kruyswijk was 11th here in 2019 and at the time, his form on the DP World Tour read an ugly MC-MC-MC-MC-38-MC-MC-MC. Only when twice returning home did he produce competitive golf, yet it clicked when he arrived here.
The South African generally limited the mistakes that week bar an eight at the par-five 13th on day one, and returns now having stepped up to a career-best level over the past nine months, triggered by two wins in August.
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