Malaysians will want to impress
Maybank Championship offers local and Asean players a good platform to make a name for themselves
MALAYSIA will have 13 players in this year’s Maybank Championship, and on paper it appears to be one of the better contingents yet.
Indeed, this is probably the strongest lineup the country has fielded in a premier golf tournament to date and with that, a couple of decent performances, if not more, should be forthcoming.
The event, which carries US$3mil in prize money and is scheduled to run from Thursday through Sunday at Saujana Golf & Country Club in Shah Alam, will have Gavin Green, Ben Leong, Shahriffuddin Ariffin and Nicholas Fung at the forefront of the host nation’s bid for glory.
Also set to tee it up on the Palm course this week will be Wilson Choo, Amir Nazrin, R. Nachimuthu, Danny Chia, Arie Irawan, Kemarol Baharin, Sukree Othman, Kenneth De Silva and Kim Leun Kwang.
This tournament presents the local lads with a good opportunity to make their mark on a European Tour event that enjoys huge international coverage.
For Green in particular, and to some extent Leong, Fung and Chia, they will view the Maybank Championship in a more positive sense. They have had more exposure to the rigours of such tournaments and competitiveness and it should hold them in better stead than their compatriots.
However, having said that, Shahriffuddin and Nazrin have clearly embraced the challenge better than most on the PGM Tour.
Shahriffuddin is a two-time Player of the Year, having topped the Order of Merit 5over the last two seasons, and won for the first time on the Asian Development Tour last season.
Nazrin, on the other hand, registered a top-50 finish in the Maybank Championship last year and will obviously be looking to do better than that this time around.
In the first two tournaments on the domestic Tour he was second and first, showing good form albeit in events that are considerably weaker than this week.
The only tournament of its kind that boasts an Asean category, the Maybank Championship will have Myanmar’s Ye Htet Aung, Danny Masrin of Indonesia, Singaporeans Johnson Poh and Jessie Yap, and the Philippines’ Angelo Que teeing off on Thursday.
The five Asean players join the field by way of sponsors’ exemptions and are also representatives of their countries and the region as a whole in the event which has become Malaysia’s premier golf tournament.
Also in town this week will be star attractions South African globetrotter and four-time major champion Ernie Els, Irishman Padraig Harrington, a winner of three Majors, last season’s winning European Ryder Cup captain Thomas Bjorn and popular Spaniard Miguel Angel Jimenez, among others.
Defending champion Shubhankar Sharma, Japan’s Ryo Ishikawa and Yuta Ikeda, young Thailand stars Poom Saksansin and Jazz Janewattananond are also in the field, which should make things interesting.
For Bjorn, who will parade the Ryder Cup trophy in Kuala Lumpur with Harrington – who has assumed the European captaincy for next year’s title defence in the United States – it should be a pleasant return to the city where he won the biennial EurAsia Cup last February.
The Dane was captain of Europe when they defeated Asia in the third edition of the competition at Glenmarie. He then went on to lead Europe to that famous victory over the US in the Ryder Cup in France last September.
Numerous fans at the tournament, whose tagline is “Where the Best Meet”, will also look forward to Jimenez coming back in Kuala Lumpur.
Always with a smile on his face, Jimenez has great fan support having won seven times in Asia, including one in Thailand. He will surely draw a good number of followers when he plays Saujana.
He has won in each of the last five seasons on the PGA Champions Tour, among them the Senior British Open Championship last July.