Ramblers in no hurry but make decisive move

IN THE eyes of many, Kathleen Mohan is the epitome of what a Golf Masters manager should be. She enters a team or two each year, she takes a reasonable amount of interest in how they are faring, she occasionally enters the transfer market and, if her hopes of overall victory disappear, she always has the incentive of finishing higher up the leaderboard than husband Val to sustain her to the end of the season.

Taking pride in her home club, she named her team this year Rossmore Ramblers, although their most expensive player hasn't been able to ramble much lately. Like 2,959 other managers, Mohan opted at the start of the season to pin her hopes on Tiger Woods and duly parted with €7 million of her €12.5 million budget.

The last time he contributed anything to her cause was at the US Open, where he picked up his 14th major title and pumped €200,000 into the coffers of the Ramblers and the 1,737 other managers who had stuck with him through one knee surgery.

It may feel like years, but it isn't even a month since Woods announced that he would miss the rest of the season due to further and more extensive surgery. Mohan couldn't be accused of panicking on foot of this news.

In fact, being away from home and not exactly obsessed with the progress (or regress) of the Ramblers, she took no action whatsoever until the eve of the Scottish Open, when she checked the team's overall ranking and found them down in 4,787th place.

She then decided to do what 360 other managers had done post-Torrey and transferred out Tiger. On the principle of in for a penny, in for a pound, she looked back at her original selection and decided that, good knees or not, she would also dispense with the services of David Howell, Kevin Stadler, Daniel Vancsik, Oliver Fisher and Pablo Martin. In fact, the only player she decided to keep was Graeme McDowell. Clever Kathleen.

McDowell and new recruits Kenny Perry, Miguel Angel Jimenez, Francesco Molinari, Briny Baird, Thomas Levet and Ken Duke (she'd never heard of him but he was playing in the John Deere Classic and filled the €1.3 million hole in her team) combined for a week 14 total of €330,333, which was good enough to earn Mohan our regular prize of a fourball at Druids Heath and a Nike Tiger Woods polo shirt.

It also lifted the Ramblers 3,677 places in the rankings, although, having carried Woods for so long, it is fairly unlikely they will crack on to challenge for one of our cash prizes.

The top two overall switched places this week, as Brendan Hill's Valhalla earned €176,900 (rank 563) compared to €147,450 (rank 1,485) for Peter and Emma Lynch's EL 59. Michael's Masters (Michael Webster) held on to the number three slot.

Backstreets (Kevin Barry), the highest-ranked team to include both Scottish Open winner McDowell and John Deere champion Perry, climbed six places to fourth. Paco 7 (Gordon Mills) rounds out the top five, having risen from seventh thanks to replacing Robert Karlsson with Miguel Angel Jimenez.