Monty muses on mistake

Scottish Open: The line between expectation and hope is thin, but it is enough to trip up the most confident of athletes, as Colin Montgomerie revealed yesterday when he spoke about the most catastrophic shot of his career - the seven-iron approach to the final green at Winged Foot in last month's US Open

"I expected to win on the 18th fairway. I had done the hard thing," said the Scotsman, who has had almost a month to think about the hole that cost him the chance to win his first major championship.

"But expecting to do something is dangerous in golf. It is always harder when you are expected to do something rather than just hoping. I should have just hoped."

The double bogey that followed Montgomerie's momentary mental lapse will go down as one of the sadder moments in recent memory, although he has since spent time with his sports psychologist, Hugh Mantle, and the pair have analysed exactly what went wrong.

Part of their discussion focused on the moments before he struck the ball, when he was forced to wait while his playing partner, Vijay Singh, sought a ruling from officials.

"I'm convinced that, if I was to go up to that ball at my usual pace and hit it, I'd have probably won. But you have to play according to your playing partner and the rules. If I'd been in the tent he would have had to wait on me. It's amazing what runs through the mind at that stage," Montgomerie said.

To the Scot's credit, he has bounced back with two top-10 finishes in three tournaments since that fateful afternoon in New York. Nor has he allowed the loss and disappointment to still the belief that his efforts to win the elusive major might end next week at Royal Liverpool, which is staging this year's British Open.

"You either don't want to learn from what happened in the past or you do - and hopefully we're going to learn from it. I'll only stop thinking about winning a major championship if I win one.

"We've been through it all, and hopefully if that occasion happens again in the not too distant future I will be able to cope in a different way," he said.

But, if Montgomerie's mind has already turned to next week's major tournament, another of his Ryder Cup colleagues was more concerned about the Scottish Open starting today at Loch Lomond, north of Glasgow. Sergio Garcia is seldom seen on the European Tour these days, preferring to play almost exclusively in the US for reasons that have never been altogether clear.

Garcia has never enjoyed particularly great relations with rules officials on this side of the Atlantic, and the 26-year-old Spaniard does not have much truck with British tax laws, which require professional athletes to pay the government a proportion of their earnings in Britain even though not resident there.

"It keeps not only myself but a lot of guys from playing more often," said Garcia yesterday.

"Unfortunately that's the way it is and I can't do much about it. It's something I've stopped bothering about. I let my lawyers and accountants take care of that."

This is probably just as well, because Garcia has a lot to think about on the course, not least his place in the European team for the Ryder Cup, which is now in jeopardy after a run of poor form stretching back a few months.

"I am playing here because I want to make a bit of an extra effort to get on the team. All I need is a couple of good weeks," he said.

The Irish playing at Loch Lomond are Darren Clarke, Paul McGinley, Peter Lawrie, Graeme McDowell, Damien McGrane, Gary Murphy, David Higgins and Michael Hoey. - Guardian Service