Sultans of the swing favour Emirates club

Golf Dubai Desert Classic: Padraig Harrington traverses time zones around the globe almost as frequently as day follows night. He is a man of perpetual motion. And yet, despite visiting different places and experiencing different cultures, he can still be amazed.

Dubai is a source of such wonderment; and, year after year, he arrives to find new towering skyscrapers on land that was, well, previously desert.

Yesterday, just as he can be on most days, the Dubliner is to be found on the range, hitting ball after ball. Golf is on his mind, but so are architectural matters. He stops what he is doing and points over to five or six towers that seemingly have materialised from nowhere. They weren't here a year ago.

"Do you know how many skyscrapers they're building over there?" he asks. "Go on, guess." Ten? Twenty? The font of knowledge shakes his head. Thirty? "No," he says, "there'll be 69 skyscrapers there when they're finished - 69 of them!"

That's impressive, but where Harrington is standing is equally impressive. The golf course at the Emirates, the venue for this week's Dubai Desert Classic, has lush fairways and pristine greens where once existed only arid terrain. Man's ingenuity and water from the nearby desalination plants have combined with oil money to create one of the many golfing oases being created in these parts.

The tournament has attracted the world's number one, Tiger Woods, and the world's number three, Ernie Els. As Harrington, now 11th in the world rankings, but only .03 behind ninth-placed Kenny Perry and .01 behind 10th-placed Stuart Appleby, observes, "as regular tour events go, this is one of the biggest of the year".

For Harrington, though, it comes early in his schedule. He's still unsure where his game is, how sharp he is. Yesterday, he was in the gym at 7.30 a.m.

"I find gym work helps big time, it's always a good way of getting back on your body clock. Discipline when you're travelling helps too," he says.

Encouragingly, he also believes his game is ahead of where he expected it to be at this time. "I've just prepared better all round coming into the season. I've still a bit of work to do, but I'm definitely ahead of the game when compared to other years," he insists.

Despite losing to Woods in the quarter-finals at La Costa, he takes solace from getting that far.

"It's a pity to come up against Tiger when you're not in from, (but) even the way I played, if I had holed a few putts, I would have put it up to him more. I'd a realistic chance. I'm swinging the club well, if not hitting the ball well, and I'm hitting more fairways. I hit 75 per cent of fairways in La Costa and that's an average I'd certainly like to keep for a while."

Harrington is still the top-ranked European player in the world rankings, just outside the top 10. This week holds promise of a return to that elite group.

"The way I look on it," he says, "is that I am a win away from seventh. I've a good chance of skipping some of the guys ahead of me this week."

Indeed, just as Woods observed after his win in the matchplay, many eyes are already moving towards the US Masters at Augusta next month.

"Yes," he agrees, "that's my main focus too. The Players Championship is in there too but it is the Masters, definitely, that I'm really looking to be ready for. I've four or five weeks to get there."

Harrington is sticking to a similar schedule as last year in the build-up to the season's first major, playing in this week's Desert Classic and then taking two weeks off before going Stateside for the Players, the following week's BellSouth and, then, the Masters.

The week afterwards he will come back to his roots to play in the Irish PGA Championship at St Margaret's, the only extra tournament on his early season schedule, "because I like to play in it and because I always want to support tournaments in Ireland".

But the real bread and butter is on the bigger stage, for he really is a global player. In his three outings on the European Tour this season, he has finished first (in the Hong Kong Open before Christmas), 37th (in Malaysia) and fifth (in La Costa). His stroke average is 69.38 (which incredibly, but symptomatic of the standard on the circuit, leaves him down in 18th place) and he has moved to third in the Order of Merit and into fifth on the Ryder Cup (world points) table.

For now, however, Harrington - into the third of a three-week stint on tour - is seeking to find the key while all the time looking ahead to Augusta. The trip to the desert is another step towards achieving that destiny.