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Focus on Indians as Asian Tour returns
Thailand’s Chapchai Nirat won the SAIL Open with a winning score of 32-under 256 and an equally mind-boggling victory margin of 11 shots over Gaganjeet Bhullar and Richard Moir.
Next week, the Classic Golf & Country Club will mark its return to the Asian Tour after 2009, but its place in the record books is far from forgotten. On March 21 that year, Thailand’s Chapchai Nirat won the SAIL Open with a winning score of 32-under 256 and an equally mind-boggling victory margin of 11 shots over Gaganjeet Bhullar and Richard Moir.
A lot has changed since then. Chapchai isn’t the player he was, and Bhullar has graduated and gone on to win on the European Tour.
The golf course too has matured and when the country’s newest Asian Tour event, the Classic Golf & Country Club International Championship, gets underway in Nuh, Haryana, from September 12, there is an air of confidence among the course officials that it will not be a cakewalk this time.
The golf course has been set up in a way that “good shots will be rewarded, and bad ones penalised”, but the chances of a runaway winner are being termed as remote.
Carrying a prize purse of $300,000, the Sunday of next week could also see an Indian win for the first time this season, pick up the top cheque of $54,000 and an exemption on the Asian Tour. But above all, world ranking points will be playing on the Indian players’ minds with the Tokyo Olympics less than a year away.
Leading the Indian challenge will be Ajeetesh Sandhu, Chiragh Kumar, Rashid Khan, Jyoti Randhawa, all winners on the Asian Tour, S Chikkarangappa, who has come close many a time, and the young Viraj Madappa, who burst on to the scene last year by winning the Take Solutions Masters at Bengaluru.
