The qualifying players for the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship
The revised Worlds Golf Rankings were released earlier today and Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are still very much the top dogs of the game. This has ensured that they will be the top seeds in the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship.
The event will kick off next week at the Ritz Carlton Golf Club.
For those among us who are new to the golf fandom, the Match Play format is a scoring system where a player or team is awarded a point for each hole in which they have defeated their competitors. The other format of play is the stroke play. The stroke play
involves counting the total strokes over one or more 18-hole rounds.
Only a handful of tournaments follow the Match Play scoring system anymore and the WGC Championship is one of the most prestigious events among them. Other tournaments following this system are the Presidents Cup, Volvo World Match Play Championship, HSBC
Women’s World Match Play Championship, Solheim Cup and the US Amateur Championships.
With the basic details taken care-off, let us shift back to reporting on the field of the upcoming event. In a surprising turn of events the defending champion, Henrik Stenson, just barely missed the 64-player cut. He was just a painful 0.006 points behind
the last player to be included.
The top 64 from the new rankings will be earning automatic spots to the Match Play. The head to head event will officially start off with practice sessions that have been scheduled for precisely a week from today. We bet that Stenson will be praying for
a player to withdraw from the event which would mean that the field will be expanded to include him.
The field as it is now has all the makings of an epic event that has the potential of increasing viewership tenfold. All the “who’s who” of the golf industry have qualified for the event. The names we are particularly excited about are the tournaments 2009
breakout star Rory McIlroy, Luke Donald, Steve Stricker, Ernie Els and Jim Furyk.
Another name that has already started creating a lot of buzz in regards to the event is the 22 year old star in the making, Rickie Fowler. Could he follow in McIlroy’s footsteps and be the new breakout star of the event? The player has qualified for the
first Match Play event of his career and goes into the event as the 29th seed. Other promising young guns that will be joining him on the field are 40th seed Japanese Ryo Ishikawa and number 57 Italian Matteo Manassero.
Rarely can an event boast the appearance of all top players in the world rankings. For now, we are praying that none of them chooses to withdraw. Sorry Stenson! Better Luck next time?
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