Adjusting to new surroundings in the Texas heat

23/09/2019

All throughout PGA Cup week, Captain Cameron Clark will be providing a daily update from inside the Great Britain & Ireland camp ahead of the 29th PGA Cup matches at Barton Creek Resort in Austin Texas.

Clark 3

We’ve all been waiting for this trip for a while and I think everyone was just ready to get here and get focused on what we’re trying to do. It was a really nice welcome from The PGA of America to Barton Creek with the all signage and everything so we’re really pleased with that.

We’re still waiting on four players because Paul O’Hara, Matthew Cort, Robert Coles and David Dixon all played in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, so it will be great when we get all ten players together and then we’ll get down to work for the next three days leading up to Friday.

Monday was just a chance for the six guys to get a feel a feel of the course and go get back into the swing of it. We had a fairly quiet first night. A few of the guys just had room service and generally we had just a pretty quiet night and we were all to bed reasonably early because we were all tired after a long journey.

Clark 1

Downtime will be huge this week, especially with the heat. It’s something we’ve thought about a lot. We don’t want to overplay them this week. It’s also very hot out here so we’re just trying to keep the players rehydrated as much as possible and make sure they've all got plenty of fluids on board.

There’s a lot of strategy around the golf course but it’s a reasonably straight forward golf course. As long as they keep the ball in play that’s key around here, I think there’s a lot of prominence put on fairways.

We (Michael Watson and David Higgins) were out here in June and the course hasn’t changed too much. It’s a little bit thicker in the rough and I think the guys are going to be focussed around the greens particularly, I think that’s where the match is going to be won and lost. It’s not an overly long golf course, it’s just a case of hottie fairways, hitting greens and it you do miss it find a way to get up and down. There’s a big focus on the short game for us this week.