Be Careful What You Wish For

Well we didn't get any snow over the weekend but I decided I couldn't face the frozen wasteland and temporary greens masquerading as Royal Ascot and opted to spend a few hours on Saturday morning at the driving range getting myself accustomed to the shiny new Ping I15 irons I'd decided to demo.

Even though the bay was protected from the harshest blasts of the icy wind I still wasn't overly enthused and the heated bay didn't really cut it. I have to be honest and say I ended up getting myself between a rock and a hard place. I really wanted to go through the bag with the Ping irons and give them a damn good workout, but I was also conscious of the need to work on the changes I'd been shown last Saturday in my lesson. In hindsight, the Pings could probably have waited for another day.

In the end I didn't swing the club great, at least not regularly. The clubs themselves played ball and were a dream to hit. The ball striking was pretty good throughout but let's just say there were a few that were directionally challenged left and right. The thing I noticed with the Pings over my Taylormade TP's were just how forgiving they were when it didn't quite find the sweetspot. Mind you, with the ground harder than a train load of Millwall fans it was hard to get any realistic idea of distances.

I had planned to go out on Sunday and repeat the exercise and see what happened but to be honest I looked out of the window about 9.00am and just couldn't be bothered. I was naively thinking I could play the Turkey Trot on the 4th with my old clubs and give the I15's a good honest examination on the Sunday. However having jokingly asked for snow to stop me hitting the Pings at all it seems we are in for a bit of a tricky 24 hours with a decent covering of snow forecast. That should put paid to any thoughts of getting a round in this weekend. Maybe the golfing gods are just teasing me and making me look at the shiny sticks just sitting there crying out to be used.

At least by not playing or practicing I could enjoy the golf from Dubai. I loved the fact that my two favourite players, Westwood and Poulter really went for it. It's a shame the play-off ended the way it did with Teflon (aka Poulter and his non-stick fingers) dropping his ball onto his marker and moving it to pick up a penalty shot. It was questionable whether he'd have made the putt anyway but a sad way to lose such a big event.

If you haven't seen it, Poulter, Westwood and Graham McDowell have been having a real go at each other (in a extremely funny way) on Twitter lately with Westwood and Poulter in particular having some good banter about clothing and colour co-ordination. If you've missed out I strongly suggest getting on there and checking it out.

I'm off to try and keep warm and pray that we escape lightly when the snow comes. After all, don't the Met boys know there are new irons to be used.