EDDIE PEPPERELL

Given the poor weather and the ongoing lockdown in England, I was fortunate to be able to head to Dubai not long after seeing in the new year. I had planned to put in a decent amount of work during the Christmas period, but the combination of bad weather and Covid-related restrictions meant I didn’t get a great deal of practice in. As such, I decided to go to Dubai a bit earlier than planned.

My instructor, Mike Walker, was in Dubai for the full week before the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, which enabled me to head to the event not short on coaching or repetition. We identified a couple of key areas for improvement last year and we’re still working on those. It’s been good so far and now it’s just a case of getting back into the rhythm of competitive golf and taking it from there.

You never really know how you’re going to get on in your first tournament back – you always go out there and hope you better your expectations, because when the opposite happens it can be a little demoralising. Fingers crossed I’ll be writing about the former in next month’s column.

The good news is that I feel relatively confident with all aspects of my game. For me, the key is my iron play, and myself and Mike are always trying to be diligent with regards to my technique, particularly around mid-iron play. When that’s good, I tend to have my best results and when it’s off, I don’t tend to perform well. I’ve been seeing some encouraging signs in practice with my driving, short game and putting, too. Generally speaking, I feel pretty good about everything.

I don’t have any specific goals in terms of performance, but being structured and diligent in my practice is certainly a focus. If I can stay on top of that, there should be some good consistency and some good results. I don’t tend to see things as specific years anymore because everything seems to blend into one. It’s just one long career that ebbs and flows – those ebbs can come between seasons or within them depending on various circumstances.

I’m hoping that things continue to progress in the direction they were until 2020, which was a bit of an aberration to be honest. It was a really strange year and a lot different to, say, 2016 – the last time I was in a bit of a trough. That year, I played terribly, lost my confidence and lost my card. I bounced back from that nicely and I’m pretty sure that had 2020 panned out in a way that was more normal, I would have turned it into a better year than it was.

I’m typically a player who has various shifts in momentum throughout the course of the season, and often my good results come off the back of spells of poor form. Last year, I was effectively denied the ability to react to those troughs. Given 2021 should be back to something like normal, I hope I’ll be able to rekindle that.

I’m just seeing 2020 as a bit of a write off. There were a lot of variables and I’m not being too hard on myself. Plus, people reacted differently to the circumstances. Everyone is human, and while some probably didn’t mind the new nature of tour life, and indeed wider life, others struggled to adapt.

I’ve been encouraged by the European Tour schedule for this year. I’m quite surprised at how European and Uk-centric it is, which from my perspective is nice. I’m not optimistic that we’ll see full crowds at any sporting event this year, but hopefully we’ll see some fans at limited capacity by the summer.

With regards to my bag, I’ll be putting the new Ping G425 driver in play. I did some testing in Dubai and it performed very well. Other than that, I won’t change much. I’m happy with the equipment and as this year rolls on, I’ll grow a bit more accustomed to it. At the start of last year, there was a period of tinkering, but I’m fairly settled with it now. I think there’s cause for optimism with my gear and indeed my game.

“I’ve been seeing some encouraging signs. I feel pretty good about everything”