Monday, November 17, 2008

Ian Poulter Had a Point

When Poulter pulled out of the Singapore Open citing the belief that if he played poorly, it would affect his world ranking, I thought it was a sad commentary on how the world rankings system works. Well, it turns out Poulter may have had a point. Last week, the distance between Sergio (8.68) and Phil (8.15) was just .53 of a point. This week, after Phil had a top ten finish at the Singapore Open, the distance is .64 between he (7.95) and Sergio (8.59). I don't know what it would have been if Phil hadn't played, but it must be disappointing to think that a top 10 wasn't good enough to gain any ground on the guy in front of him.

Of course for about 522 weeks, the guy in front of him has been Tiger. So, maybe Phil's used to this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think it is a fairly good system, the world ranking system, the way it works right now anyway. Players are bound to lose out on points that they gained last year around this time because every quarter points from previous two years are deducted. Now it is not so much so about Phil having had a top ten finish that hurt him, but the fact that the divisor for the tournaments went up by one point. Now even if Phil did not have a top ten finish and missed the cut at this event he would still have slid down the list except of course the top ten finish might have arrested that slide. So Ian Poulter did it to ensure that the divisor did not go up by one notch which would have hurt his cause if and only if he performed poorly. I think it was a risk worth taking for Ian considering that this was such a big ticket event and he had a good chance of a neat finish on the leaderboard.

All that we know is a young 22 year old who had previously had no experience of playing in a big ticket event got a chance to play alongside Phil Mickelson for two days and he couldn’t thank his stars enough and the people responsible for ensuring Poulter lost out on his driver!

Cheers

Rob Turner
GolfSwingSecretsRevealed.com