Paul Casey reaches desert final

Perhaps this will be the year in which Paul Casey demonstrates c o n c l u s i v e p r o o f o f h i s prodigious talent. The 31-year-old from Cheltenham, now based a 90-minute drive from Tucson in Scottsdale, Arizona, will become the first Englishman to contest a final of the Accenture Match Play Championship after he overcame the Surrey-based professional Ross Fisher in an encounter that was more a battle of attrition than one of those gunfights that lent these parts enduring renown.
Casey and Fisher were two of the sharpest shooters all week at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, near where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday left several victims lying in the dust in the infamous Gunfight at OK Corral. The desert heat and the sheer physical toll of playing two matches in one day made the Englishmen two tired gunslin-gers and when Fisher missed a 12ft par putt for a half on the 14th hole to fall two down he looked as doomed as Billy Clanton.
When his ball finished amid the Saguaro cacti on the next hole he struggled to extricate himself from the trouble but Casey failed to capitalise and they halved with bogey sixes. Fisher staged a late rally with successive birdies on the 15th and 16th to narrow the gap to one hole but Casey secured a 2&1 win with another birdie on the penultimate green.
His victory in Abu Dhabi and a fourth-place finish at the Dubai Desert Classic made for an encouraging start to the season and he has carried his confidence all the way across to the Sonoran Desert. “The goals are the same, the majors and the big tournaments,” confirmed Casey, who has not improved on his tied-for-sixth finish at The Masters in 2004 in 18 majors since then.

His performance level has been the most consistently reliable of the past week. In his five matches he was never behind at any point. Shaun O’Hair had suffered a bout of food poisoning on Friday after eating a pepperoni pizza and was in no shape to halt Casey in the morning quarter-finals, which the European Ryder Cup stalwart won 4&3. Fisher, the 2008 European Open winner, had followed a seven-bird-ie haul on Friday, which secured a remarkable 4&3 victory over former US Open champion Jim Furyk, with another seven-birdie round in his quarter-final against Justin Leonard, who won the Open Championship at Royal Troon in 1997, for a 2&1 win.
But the birdies dried up in the afternoon, with Casey and Fisher producing only six between them and one more bogey.
Mental strength, more than the brute strength inherent in his game, pulled Casey through. “I know what it is like to play 36 holes of match play in a day through playing in three Ryder Cups, the most extreme and most fatiguing I have ever felt on a golf course, and that experience helped to pull me through,” he said. “This isn’t quite as bad but it was tough and gruelling and Ross made it as hard for me as he could.”
In today’s 36-hole final Casey will play Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 US Open champion from Australia who won this event in 2006 before finishing runner-up in 2007 to Hen-rik Stenson. Ogilvy was a convincing 4&2 winner over the American Stewart Cink, whom Tiger Woods battered 8&7 in last year’s final. Ironically, Ogilvy played a practice round here with Casey two weeks ago. “I think that was very useful,” Casey acknowledged. “It was going to be useful just playing any round I played down here but especially so playing with Geoff because he knows desert golf very well, having lived out here for a while. I took a lot out of that one round. We didn’t keep score, we just played and it was all very casual but it will be different tomorrow.”
Life may be different, too, for Rory McIlroy after he wooed the American galleries with several precocious performances, including a win over “Tiger-slayer” Tim Clark. His week culminated in a courageous 2&1 defeat by Ogilvy in yesterday’s quarter-finals. He was midway through his round with Hunter Mahan on Thursday when a spectator cried out, “Hey, Ronald McDonald, I’ll have a quarter-pounder with cheese.” The teenager laughed – “It was funny and I’ve probably been called worse because of my hair” – before he birdied three of the final four holes to beat his American opponent on the final green. Nothing much fazes the 19-year-old from Holywood, Co Down.
After seven birdies and just one dropped shot, Ogilvy left McIlroy with a downhill, left-to-right putt from 12ft on the 16th hole to stay in the match, precisely the kind of challenge to test the young man’s character. His nerve held, his putting stroke was true and the putt dropped. An eighth birdie in a blistering round on the penultimate hole secured a 2&1 victory for Ogilvy but, by breaking into the top 15 of the world rankings ahead of former US Open champion Jim Furyk through his efforts here, McIlroy has made his mark.
His progress and the striking maturity of his play and demeanour coincided with Ernie Els, a former world No 1, proclaiming that McIlroy will soon challenge Woods for this distinction. “I think that you’re looking at the next No 1 in the world with him,” said Els of the Northern Irishman. “He’s got all the tools and he’s probably got the current No 1, hopefully, not going to do what he’s been doing the last three years.”
Source:the times