Willett back on form with seven birdies to reignite race for merit title

There is life left in the young dog yet. Danny Willett showed that he does not intend to surrender the Race To Dubai fight meekly, with a tenacious 67 in the third round of the Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa.

This was the Masters champion’s lowest round since the Ryder Cup. In the three events he played following Hazeltine – which, in itself, was a forgettable week for the Englishman – Willett missed the cut, then finished 75th and 68th in two 78-man fields.

And when he began this Sun City tournament with a 75 and 74, it seemed as if he was determined to allow Henrik Stenson to take the coveted European Tour’s order of merit title without so much as having to put on his glove. But the 29-year-old yesterday rolled up his sleeves and promised to make the 40-year-old Swede work for it.

In the trickiest conditions of the week on the Gary Player course, Willett posted the second-lowest score of the day, bowing only to the remarkable 64 shot by leader Jeunghun Wang, the Korean who moved to 11 under to hold a three-shot advantage over former Open champion Louis Oosthuizen. Willett was clearly delighted by his turnaround in fortunes, which came courtesy of seven birdies. Having announced on Friday that he was pulling out of the World Cup of Golf in two weeks’ time, he felt free to focus on the job at hand.

“The head has been the missing part,” he said. “We’d made a decision to play five weeks in a row, but I withdrew from the World Cup because my back wouldn’t possibly hold up. That kind of eases you off, knowing that you now have just got to concentrate on this one thing. The game was a little bit better and it was nice to get in a low one.”

Stenson fired a commendable 69 and on four under he will put Rory McIlroy out of next week’s Dubai finale equation if he stays in the top seven.

However, he needs to win and Willett needs to come outside the top 10 if the race is to be wrapped up today. That does not seem at all likely now and Stenson is steeling himself for a battle to the line. “It’s good to see Danny play well today,” he said. “He’s had a tough couple of months, so sooner or later he’ll find his form again and it appears like this might be the moment.”