Great Scott! County champ tops 2020’s Order of Merit
SCOTT Wormleighton (Birstall) has won the Leicestershire and Rutland 2020 Order of Merit,
The current county champion and a first team regular, Wormleighton has a handicap index of 4.5 in the latest World Handicap System.
He amassed 334 points from five counting championships, including winning the Amateur Championship around his home course when the delayed tournament went ahead. He gained 180 points from this success, the main contributor to his overall spot.
His other points came from the Wykes Bowl, the county match-play championship, the Open Championship and the Leicestershire Fox, with the Robin Fraser Trophy also counting towards his total.
But last year’s
OoM was extremely closely contested.
Wormleighton won by just two points from former first team county captain Martin Anderson (Kibworth), runnerup with a 332 points tally.
Freddie Macarthur (Ullesthorpe Court) was third with 310.5 points.
Both Anderson and Macarthur also competed in all five competitions. Indeed, Anderson won the county matchplay title for the Wykes Bowl. George Raitt (Whetstone), with 288 points from his four events, was in fourth place, just ahead of Luke Burrows (Cosby) on 271 points from five.
Raitt won the 2020 Midland Order of Merit with his total haul of 485 points.
There were six counting events, fewer than in previous years due to the lockdowns.
Raitt did well in the Midland Closed Championship, clinching 210 points, and picked up 195 points in the Midland Open, along with 80 points at the Leicestershire Fox in his own county.
Raitt was 50 points clear of his nearest rival, Walsall’s Jenson Forrester,
with 435 points.
Two other county golfers made the top ten. Macarthur, with 300 points, was sixth in the final Midland OoM table, while Burrows, on 270 points, finished in ninth on countback after he tied eighth on points tally.
Chris Brook (Hinckley, 246 points) and Luke Marvell (Birstall, 166 points), both played in only three events but achieved good showings in the county union’s table.
Completing the top 10 finishers in the OoM were Oliver Lewis (Kibworth), on 150 points from five; county captain James Billingham (Cosby) on 148 from four, and Zack Stafford (Glen Gorse), on 131.5 also from four.
Billingham has won the county golf union OoM for three years in a row since 2017 and Anderson was an OoM winner in 2014 and 2015.
The Leicestershire and Rutland OoM was launched in 2009 when the inaugural winner was Jason Palmer, an outstanding county amateur golfer, who turned professional and gained a full European Tour playing card before suffering a career-limiting hand injury.
But later the OoM criteria were expanded to include more events, such as the inter-county Anglian League matches, as well as intercounty friendlies, and the Eastern Counties Foursomes Championship, to reflect more of the season’s full activities.
In the past year, of course, there were no county matches played because of the coronavirus lockdown restrictions, which affected the whole of the scheduled programme. The England Golf Midland tournament was also axed.
Nevertheless, the competition for points was as intense as ever for the events which did go ahead on rearranged dates, whenever there was an easing of restrictions.