With a total of nine Irishmen competing across the four venues staging qualifiers for the ISPS HANDA Senior Open at Gleneagles, hopes were high that at least one would play his way into the field but it wasn’t to be.
Ballymena’s Cameron Clark, competing at the qualifier at Stirling Golf Club in Scotland came closest but his level-par round of 72 saw him finish tied for eighth with just four places available and he’d have needed to eagle the par-5 18th to join a three-way playoff for the final spot.
Gary Murphy birdied three of his final four holes to also shoot a level-par round on Blairgowrie’s Landsdowne Course, but with just three qualification places up for grabs here, he came up three shots shy.
The lowest scoring took place on Blairgowrie’s Rosemont Course and though both Padraig Dooley and amateur Eamonn O’Connor went round in level-par 73s, they were five shots off the qualification mark.
That means that defending champion Pádraig Harrington, 2022 winner Darren Clarke, and Paul McGinley will be the only Irish representatives at the final senior major of the year.
Clarke won his title at the same venue in 2022, edging Harrington by a shot in an Irish one-two, but a strong international field has assembled that includes KJ Choi, Alex Cejka, Stephen Dodd, and Miguel Ángel Jiménez – all former Senior Open champions – along with 12 other former major champions, including Zach Johnson, Stewart Cink, Ernie Els, and Henrik Stenson.
Harrington and Clarke are among just five players in history to have lifted both the Claret Jug and the Senior Open trophy, and Cink, Els, Johnson and Stenson all have a chance to make it a six-strong crew this week.
McGinley also has fond memories of the Kings Course at Gleneagles having led Europe to a famous 16.5-11.5 Ryder Cup victory over the United States here in 2014.
The championship will be contested over 72 holes, with the action getting underway on Thursday.
Leave a comment