Roos ready for tough course
HE didn’t play in the tournament the last time the Sunshine Tour visited the Ebotse Links Golf Course, but Jake Roos has reinvigorated his game and will go into the Gauteng Championship there this week as one of the favourites.
Fresh off a frustrating play-off loss – odd for a man who won the first five of his six Sunshine Tour titles in play-offs – last weekend in the Players Championship, he will have taken great heart from his ability to score whenever the course presented him an opportunity.
And he will be keen to set the play-off record straight with the man who beat him, Jaco Prinsloo. The other man who was in that threeway play-off, Daniel van Tonder, is in Kenya for the European’s Tour’s Magical Kenya Open in Nairobi this week.
In fact, Roos has also lost in five play-offs, one a six-hole marathon against Justin Harding back in 2018 in Swaziland. So he will be keen to put things beyond doubt before he heads into the final round, and, if there is something he will want to eliminate from his performance last week, it was an inexplicable inability to score in the third round while Van Tonder and Prinsloo were lining themselves up for a shot at the title.
Roos made three of his five bogeys in the tournament in that round on his way to a levelpar 72 at Dainfern Country Club, and he will take heart from the fact that this week’s tournament is being played on a much more difficult course at Ebotse than was the case last week. Given his years of experience, he will thrive on the tough conditions while others are more likely to battle.
Inevitably, repeating one tournament’s stellar performance just a week later is often difficult, and Prinsloo, while he will feel confident too, will find himself in a similar position to Roos in that regard. Someone who fell short but finished spectacularly last week is Thriston Lawrence. He closed with a 62 and he will be keen to ride that momentum at Ebotse.
The tournament tees off at 6.30am today, and Roos gets underway off the 10th tee at 7.10am together with Trevor Fisher Jnr and Hennie du Plessis.