Irish ready for return to the fray

Tour news: Slowly, but surely, Ireland's touring professionals are dusting off the cobwebs and returning to tournament duty.

This week, Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley resurface for the first time in 2006 in the Qatar Masters in Doha, while Graeme McDowell, who has spent the past three weeks practising at his home in Orlando, will play his first tournament of the year in the Phoenix Open on the US Tour next week.

For Clarke, his seasonal debut in Qatar will mark the first of back-to-back tournaments in the Gulf, as he also intends to play in next week's Dubai Desert Classic. But, as he acknowledged recently, his schedule will be dictated by the condition of his wife, Heather, who is undergoing intensive chemotherapy.

"At the moment she's doing okay, but I don't want to get ahead of myself and make plans," he said. "I'm just looking forward to playing the next five or six weeks while she's doing well. I want to try to get myself swinging the club the way I want to in the early part of the season, but I don't want to get my hopes built too far up and then have to pull out the week before events."

Clarke, though, returns to tournament action knowing his best form was produced towards the end of last season, when he won the Taiheiyo Masters in Japan in November and finished runner-up in the Nedbank Challenge and Target World Challenge in successive weeks.

And carrying that level of consistency through will also kickstart his Ryder Cup qualifying ambitions. He is 13th in the World points list and 37th in the European points list.

Although McGinley played in the Royal Trophy in Thailand earlier this month, the Qatar Masters is the real start to his season. It is a one-off stop in the Gulf for the Dubliner, who will not play in Dubai, but instead will head off to the Barbados on a family holiday along with Padraig Harrington, who is still three weeks off his first tournament of the year.

After Qatar, McGinley's season will have a strong American flavour, as the Caribbean holiday will be followed by playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the following week's Los Angeles Open and then the Accenture World Matchplay, a WGC event which also counts towards the European Tour order of merit.

"That's an important one (the matchplay), because it also counts towards European Ryder Cup points," acknowledged McGinley.

In all, there are four Irish players competing in the Qatar Masters: Clarke and McGinley will be joined by Peter Lawrie, who missed the cut in Abu Dhabi, and Meathman Damien McGrane, who secured a top-20 finish there.

Ernie Els, the world's number five, is defending his title in Qatar, and the South African will also be seeking to equal a record of cuts made on the European Tour held by Bernhard Langer. The German made every cut from the 1991 PGA Championship at Wentworth to the same tournament in 1996, a total of 69 events, and Els will move alongside him on that mark if he survives in Doha. The South African's run began in the 2000 Johnnie Walker Classic.

The omens for Els are good, considering he returned from a long injury prior to Christmas and claimed the Dunhill Championship, and followed that by finishing second in the South African Open. And he is returning to a course where, last year, his final round 65 enabled him to come from five shots behind to pip Henrik Stenson by one stroke.

The purse for the Qatar Masters is 1.6 million, with 275,456 to the winner, and world number two Vijay Singh is among those in the field. The Fijian is completing his Gulf tournament engagements, having finished eighth in Abu Dhabi.

Chris DiMarco's win there on Sunday enabled him to move back into the world's top-10, in ninth position.

Incidentally, the lack of tournament play from Ireland's elite players has witnessed further falls in the world rankings, with Harrington dropping to 18th, Clarke at 19th and McGinley at 21st. McDowell's inactivity has seen him drop to 61st in the world, and he will need to hit the ground running if he is to move into the top 50 by the end of March to secure a return invitation to the US Masters.

EUROPEAN ORDER OF MERIT - Irish positions: 38th, P Harrington 59,076; 43rd, D McGrane 56,250; 55th, P Lawrie €41,790; 69th, G McDowell €27,900; 83rd, G Murphy €21,317; 99th, P McGinley 16,064.