Jason Day has a lot of memories at the WGC Dell Technologies Match Play with two victories and a third semi-final appearance across both venues in Arizona and Texas, so it is no wonder he will miss the tournament when it is removed from the schedule.
This week is set to be the last edition of the event which has been running since 1999 with Day in control of his own destiny heading into the third match of his bracket as he chases a third crown.
The Australian beat Victor Dubuisson in the 2014 decider in arguably the greatest final, if not match, in the 24-year history of this event before he beat Louis Oosthuizen two years later.
“Yes [I will miss it]. I don’t even know my record, but yes, I will. Yeah, who knows, it might come back,” said Day. “I’m hoping it does come back because we have 49 events, whatever it is, on the schedule, and a lot of those are stroke play events and we have one team event.”
Day has won this event in both the straight knockout and round robin formats and he hopes to see the Match Play return to the schedule sooner rather than later and perhaps with another rejig to the format.
“It would be nice to keep match play around. It would be nice to be able to somehow tweak the format to where you could have more guys in on Saturday and Sunday or even more so just have nine-hole rounds and it’s just like fire-rapid rounds. They could tweak the format different ways, but it would be nice to be able to keep the Match Play around just for the future.”
The 2015 PGA Champion tops his group ahead of a final game decider with two-time major winner Collin Morikawa. Day has taken maximum points from his opening two matches against Adam Svensson and Victor Perez while Morikawa is just half a point behind.
Essentially the match will be a knockout before the knockout rounds which will bring back some familiar feelings for Day from the previous format.
“It’ll definitely feel like the old-school format, which is good,” he said. “The intensity will be so much more than what it has been over the last two days, so that’s exciting. I guess the willingness to grind it out is going to be more imperative to handle or take care of business tomorrow.
“I’m just not really looking too far ahead. I know that — you said before that I’ve just got to — I’m talking about process. I’ve just got to stick to that process and try and take on every shot the best I can, and then at the end of the day if that’s good enough to beat Collin, great; if not, then go back to the drawing board and get after it again.”
Leave a comment