Montgomerie makes a move

GOLF: The psyche of a professional golfer requires a degree of selfishness. To be the best, as Colin Montgomerie knows, demands a mean core and a hard edge.

For much of yesterday, behind the glum looks and the stooped walk of a man in a world of his own, there was evidence that much of the old hunger was back, as the Scot, without a win in over nine months, moved out of the wilderness and into more familiar terrain.

By the day's end, Montgomerie was in a three-way share of the lead at the midway stage of the B&H International Open at The Belfry and, already, as he looked ahead in an attempt to recapture past glories, his mind was working overtime.

"I'm not just on this tour to make up the numbers," he insisted. "I enter every tournament to win and my ambition is as great as it ever was. I want to be the best European player again, and I am not right now."

In truth, few have really considered him a spent force. And the events since he split on Monday with Alastair McLean, his caddie of 10 years, would reassure him of that. Although he has temporarily entrusted his bag this week to Jason Henning, the regular bagman of Robert Karlsson who has taken a week off, some 25 envelopes have been slipped under his hotel bedroom door from caddies interested in taking over from McLean - and the IMG offices have received further unsolicited advances from a number threefold that. "Many of them are businessmen looking for a career change," he said.

For someone who topped the European Tour's money list for seven straight years, and who considered his sixth and fifth-place finishes of the past two years "a failure, in my eyes anyway", Montgomerie is obviously still viewed as a rather good meal ticket by prospective caddies. And yesterday's 67 for six-under-par 138 pretty much confirmed that as he topped the leaderboard alongside Greg Owen and Roger Wessels.

Behind them, though, something of a log-jam was developing. John Daly finished as one of five players just a shot adrift and, in fact, there is considerable quality crammed in the chasing pack, all of whom will fancy their chances of taking the €294,356 top prize.

Although five of the 10 European Ryder Cup players failed to make the cut, the quintet who did - Montgomerie, Padraig Harrington, Thomas Bjorn, Phillip Price and Bernhard Langer - are all handily placed to make a move over the weekend. US Open champion Retief Goosen also looked in danger of missing the cut, as did Jose Maria Olazabal, but the pair discovered birdies late on in their rounds to survive.

Of the Irish, there were mixed fortunes to say the least. Harrington, the best of them, was only a little short of describing his first round on Thursday as boring, containing as it did 17 pars and a lone birdie.

Yesterday, his round was more dramatic: it featured an eagle, three birdies and three bogeys and the 70 moved him to the three-under-par 141 mark and, much to his surprise, within touching distance of the lead.

Des Smyth showed the need for an old head when, as he put it, "grinding it out", on the way to a 70 for one-under-par 143 while Michael Hoey and Eamonn Darcy spent some anxious time out on the range before discovering they had both survived right on the cut mark, which came on two-over.

There was to be no salvation, however, for either Paul McGinley or Darren Clarke, while Ronan Rafferty's attempts to make his first cut of the season were destroyed by a second round 80.

McGinley fell away to a second round 81 - one of the worse of his professional career - to languish some nine shots over the cut mark. "I'm not making any excuses but I am just not with it," he said, "and feel drained. We do a lot of travelling in this job, and I am going to have to sit down over the weekend and look at things."

For Clarke, missing the cut only came on his finishing hole where he missed the green and failed to get up and down. The bogey finish meant he missed out by one.

There were no such worries for Harrington, though. He kick-started his round at his first hole, the 10th, with a sand wedge approach to two feet - a brave shot with the pin just three yards from the water's edge - and then added another birdie on the 17th.

Having gone 27 holes without dropping a shot, he proceeded to incur back-to-back bogeys at the first and second but then produced a quite stunning three-wood second shot of 245 yards into the wind to eight feet for an eagle at the third. A bogey at the sixth was wiped out with a finishing birdie on the ninth, his last hole.

"I'll need to putt a lot better over the weekend if I am to challenge, but I am surprised that I am so close . . . conditions today were perfect and I thought that someone would run away from the field," said Harrington.

Rather than anyone race away, there was a congested look at the top end of the leaderboard - with many players looking to make the most of a tournament's traditional moving day.