Left field

Augusta offers comfort factor but will it be enough for Woods?

Tiger Woods returned to competition at last week’s WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship in the Arizona desert under increasing pressure to clean up his game and his on-course demeanour.

Although he showed distinct signs of improvement in the latter category, his week ended abruptly when he was eliminated by Denmark’s Thomas Bjorn after 19 holes in the opening round.

It is now a distant 15 months since Woods last won a tournament anywhere in the world and he would dearly love to end that barren run with the first major of the year – the April 7-10 U.S. Masters — fast approaching.

Woods is a four-times champion at Augusta National, the permanent home of the Masters, and that venue offers him a comfort factor more than most others.

However there is no doubt the American one has been totally frustrated by his inability to string together four good rounds in one week while undergoing the fourth swing change of his career.

Comfortably the best player of his generation, he has struggled to regain his former dominance after trying to repair his deteriorating marriage last year and spending less time at practice than usual.

“Still in the process, still working on it,” Woods said last week about the swing changes he initiated with Canadian coach Sean Foley in August.

Why all the fuss about being world number one?

To much fanfare, Lee Westwood has ended the 281-week reign of Tiger Woods as golf’s world number one yet the fact the Briton has not won a major raises a couple of questions — Do rankings reward consistency rather than great achievement? And how much do they really matter?

According to former world number one and six-times major winner Nick Faldo, the answer is not as much as the big tournaments.

“It’s interesting how times have changed, how you can get to be number one without winning a major,” Faldo said. “I never understood the points scoring system, even in my day.

“But I wanted to be number one. It is a nice one to win. But majors are the one, because you have to go and win them and finish them off.”

There is a similar situation in women’s tennis where Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki is the year-end number one without a grand slam to her name. The 20-year-old last month dethroned American Serena Williams, who has not played since winning her 13th grand slam title at Wimbledon in July.

With such obvious talents as 14-times major winner Tiger and Serena it seems bizarre that golf and tennis set such importance on the vagaries of a ranking system, when other sports set less store by them.

Spain top the FIFA soccer rankings, yet you are unlikely to see them tagged as world number one in the media or referred to as such by fans. Rightly, the World Cup win is considered their ultimate achievement.

Six of the best for Europe as Ryder Cup approaches

Could the balance of power in world golf be shifting from the U.S. to Europe at the start of Ryder Cup year? Americans have traditionally dominated the upper echelons of the rankings but German Martin Kaymer and Briton Ian Poulter’s one-two finish in the Abu Dhabi Championship on Sunday lifted the pair into the world’s top-10 for the first time.

With Kaymer (sixth) and Poulter (10th) joining Lee Westwood (fourth), Padraig Harrington (seventh), Henrik Stenson (eighth) and Paul Casey (ninth), Europe now have a record-equalling six players among the leading 10.

With another heavyweight field assembling for this week’s European Tour event in Qatar, British pair Rory McIlroy (11th) and Ross Fisher (18th) and Spain’s Sergio Garcia (14th) will also be trying to bulldoze their way into world golf’s elite.

Because of the strength of the respective fields, more ranking points are up for grabs in the Middle East than at this week’s U.S. PGA Tour event, the Farmers Insurance Open in California.

Americans Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Steve Stricker and Jim Furyk may occupy four of the top five places in the rankings but it seems as though it is the European team rather than the U.S. holders who are landing the early psychological blows ahead of the Ryder Cup in Wales in October.