Pablo Larrazabal hits his second shot on Thursday on the thirteenth gap at Al Hamra Golf Club.
Getty Images
Padraig Harrington warned us. As he does most weeks these days, the earnest Irishman filmed a short preview video forward of this week’s Ras Al Khaimah Championship on the DP World Tour, and these have been among the many phrases he used to explain the fairways at Al Hamra Golf Club within the United Arab Emirates:
Very, very slender.
Extremely slender.
Tiny.
He was spot-on — as his and 130 different execs’ tee photographs haven’t been.
“As I said in my preview, the narrowest fairways I’ve ever seen, doglegs, a few slopes, heavy rough and firm,” Harrington wrote on Twitter on Friday after his second spherical. “At least it’s not blowing.
“Eventually you give up trying to hit them and just lash away.”
Indeed. Through 36 holes, the stats are wild:
— Only two gamers — Jack Senior and Grant Forrest — have hit half of the 28 fairways in play. And nobody has hit extra.
— Six gamers have hit 13 fairways (46.43 %); 4 gamers have hit 12 (42.86); 15 gamers have hit 11 (39.29); 18 gamers have hit 10 (35.71); 15 gamers have hit 9 (32.14); 28 gamers have hit eight (28.57); 20 gamers have hit seven (25); 9 gamers have hit six (21.43); 10 gamers have hit 5 (17.86); and three gamers have hit 4 (14.29).
— And then there’s Adri Arnaus. He’s hit simply two fairways in 28 possibilities — the first gap through the first spherical, and the fifth gap through the second spherical, when he drove the inexperienced.
Padraig Harrington performed with amateurs for per week. He discovered 2 key takeaways
Nick Piastowski
In brief, Al Hamra is tight. After all, if you happen to look at last year’s season-long statistics on the DP World Tour, the place 177 gamers have been measured, solely 27 hit lower than 50 % of their fairways. And last year saw much of the same at the UAB observe — of the 72 gamers who made the minimize, solely three hit 50 % of the fairways or higher.
Still, these are one of the best gamers on the planet, and that is the bomb-and-gauge period. Leaders Rasmus Hojgaard, David Law and Adrian Meronk? They’ve mixed to hit 20 of the 28 fairways — Hojgaard has hit 5, Law seven and Meronk eight. The DP World Tour even shared one of Hojgaard’s misses over its social media channels — on the par-4 seventeenth, he hooked his tee shot left, it hit a lightweight pole, and his ball ricocheted again into play, although within the tough.
And Arnaus, the participant who has hit solely two fairways? He’s tied for nineteenth and 5 strokes again. Meanwhile, Senior and Forrest, the 2 gamers who lead in fairways hit (at 50 %), are tied for thirty third and tied for 57th, respectively.
Your takeaway? If you want your scrambling — and/or if you happen to like your execs taking part in from the thick stuff like most of us do through the weekend — that is your match.
“Still trying to figure out how to hit fairways,” tweeted Ross Fisher, who has 5 of them.
He then added a laughing emoji.
