Matthew Southgate

After a couple of top tens at the Made in Denmark and the Belgian Knockout, I’ve struggled a little bit and I missed cuts in Germany, Spain, Ireland and Scotland. Strangely, I’ve actually been hitting the ball a lot better on the golf course in tournaments than I have been in practice, which is almost the opposite of what you’d expect. I just haven’t really been getting the most out of my rounds and I’ve been unlucky on a few occasions.

I think I missed the cut by one shot in both Spain and Ireland, which is frustrating – one putt holed here or a better approach there and all of a sudden you have the best of the conditions on a Saturday morning and a good opportunity to surge up the leaderboard in the third round. But that’s golf, and that’s the way it goes sometimes. But things are feeling much better now, so hopefully I’ll take that forward through to the end of the season.

The thing is I’ve always been a really natural player, so the more I play, the better I get. I’m much better when I’m on the course playing as opposed to on the range practising, which makes missing cuts quite irritating. I’d much rather have four rounds under my belt than spend the weekend on the range trying to improve my game. You can often find something when you’re out of the spotlight on a Saturday or Sunday and carry that on with you.

Last time I wrote about my season, I was struggling with my short game and

putting. That’s back where I want it to be now, but I’ve been fading my driver a little bit, which is often a sign that I’m not swinging it as well as I can and something I don’t really like to see. I can sometimes find myself aiming a bit further left and overcompensating when that happens, which is difficult for me as I’m much more comfortable just hitting the ball straight. I’ve been working really hard on my alignment, set-up and routine so I can neutralise my ball flight with the driver.

When you’re not playing well, it’s easy to spend hours and hours hitting balls, searching for something. When you’re working on something specific, it’s very different. I don’t think you can do too many hours of practice, but I think you can spend too much time searching for answers. You can find yourself hitting ball after ball and after a while you realise you’ve hit 200 and you’re no closer to figuring things out.

I do spend some time looking at stats, but I’m not really one for monitoring where I am on the Race to Dubai throughout the course of the season. It’s not something you can control and it’s a long season. You’re going to have ups and downs as that’s just the nature of professional golf, and golf in general. You’re going to get good breaks and bad breaks, be on the wrong side of the draw and so on.

Stats-wise, my caddie and I do keep an eye on those as they help inform your practice and your strategy. If I’m not hitting it close from 80-100 yards, for example, I’ll try and avoid leaving myself shots from that distance. Then off the course, I’ll be working on improving my play from that zone. What’s more, if you know you’re holing out well from six feet and in, it does give you a little bit more confidence when you’re standing over a putt of that length. You do have to take the stats with a little pinch of salt, though, as they don’t account for things like your ball finishing in the semi-rough, finding a divot or settling in a plugged lie in a bunker.

In terms of my upcoming schedule, I’ve entered most of the next ten tournaments on the European Tour. There’s a good run coming up and I tend to enter all the events and then pull out, rather than not signing up in the first place. There are fines if you pull out less than a week before, but I think it’s worth it as it affords you more flexibility. Sometimes if you play well you want to keep going, but sometimes you treat yourself to a week off as you’ve eased some of the pressure, so it really depends how you’re feeling at the time.

“You’re going to have ups and downs as that’s the nature of professional golf”