Turn your back and the birdies come out to play

Matt Jones deserved his win despite the stumbles on the final day.

Hell, you turn your back on these blokes for a hole or two and they are likely to get up to anything. Typical. Just after midday yesterday you do the sensible thing. You follow Scottie. He might be nine shots behind but he says it is only a matter of getting all the parts of his game to work at the same time. Such synchronisation won him the US Masters.

And, anyhow, the world’s No 1 player and defending champion Jordan Spieth is hitting off about half an hour later. Can always drop back and watch him play with Australian Matthew Jones who is, in fact, leading the tournament by three shots. Should jot that down.

The crowd is thick around the first tee and the first green. The people have the second green in a headlock as well. A thin vein of young and old along the fairway ropes link the hole’s beginnings to its end. A big audience is out but the wind that has attacked this Australian Open all week not so much. Not that crass way on the first three days at least. Trees aren’t bent in two and a person can keep a hat on without scraping the ears off the side of the face.

After three holes Scott has moved from his overnight one-under-par to three-under. Smooth strokes on the second and third greens show his putting is nudging perfect. Finally, he has the speed of these blameless surfaces calibrated correctly allowing him to effectively compute the borrow on the slopes and slides. By seven holes he is five-under after his fourth birdie of the day.

Before he putts on the seventh green a loud cheer from those around the 18th reaches Scott and playing partner Brett Rumford. Either a player has done something remarkable or Johnny Farnham has quit touring — again. It is the former. Rod Pampling has shot a record-breaking, mind-boggling, can’t believe it’s happening 61.

You see what we mean. Turn your back and the birdies come out to play. Nine, in fact, for Pampling, plus a curling eagle putt on the 18th that was so long the ball was out of breath when it fell into the hole. And to think he started with a bogey five on the first.

The tournament had not quite been turned on its head. But it had lost its footing and was past parallel. The dangerous throw would come later with extraordinary effect.

The best golf tournaments have a language all their own. It is a code. You can hear the event speak from all corners of the course. It is more than raucous cheers and bellowed groans. The volume tells you more than where the tournament has orchestrated some critical moment. The passion of the sound can tell you which player has either survived or suffered.

Yet it was the silence that Scott and Rumford would have noticed. As they ploughed on through the first nine picking up birdies there was nothing to hear from the groups behind them. Nothing from the Geoff Ogilvy-Aron Price group. Decisively nothing from the pair of Spieth or Jones. Scott would have known it was too early in the round for moans. Too much could still happen. But cheers … where were the goodtime, boozy cheers?

In fact much was happening but it was witnessed in an atmosphere made mute by disbelief. Spieth had bogeyed three of his first five holes to drop back to four-under. And Jones, after bogeying the first hole, double bogeyed the second. After three holes he had fallen to seven-under. Both men started badly and would not improve. For the first time Spieth’s plain swing produced ordinary results. And Jones, well, he was just terrified. Rationalising his worried swing. Hit that one fat, wind blew up, lousy lie.

But it was nothing that could not be salvaged — Jones was still a shot ahead of Pampling’s tournament total of six- under-par — but the course was obviously vulnerable. That they knew. Pampling had proved it emphatically. Yet by the 8th hole Jones had brought some normality back to the final day’s play. He birdied the fourth and sixth holes to stand on nine-under, just one off his overnight total of 10-under. Surely he was again out of reach. Surely. Yet still his nerves danced in his mind, tap-danced in his hands. The Australian Open has been his dream since he was six. When he met Greg Norman for the first time.

Seven shots later Jones was six-under and the tournament bounced up and down on its head. Jones yanked a long-iron into the water from a poor lie in the rough. A triple-bogey and the tournament was there to be snatched. By nearly everyone. Pampling, Scott, Spieth. And Ogilvy was hanging around, too, at four-under. If only he could putt. Nick Cullen, last year’s Australian Masters winner, was four-under with holes to play.

Then the unthinkable. At just after 3pm the Australian Open had four leaders. Jones, Pampling, Spieth and Scott were all six-under-par. So frenetic was the jostling at the top the tournament had begun talking in tongues.

Jones would have the lead on his own at 3.45pm after birdie on 14th pushed him back to seven-under. He had got there by mainly dropping shots. Bogeyed the first, double bogeyed the second, triple bogeying the ninth. Plonked in one from the bunker at the 12th after some freelance wood-chopping through the trees on the left. Another birdie on the 16th and he was in front by two. This clumsy round played with clammy hands may yet deliver him the Stonehaven Cup.

Scott saved par from four metres on the 17th and birdied the last from less than one to move to seven-under for the round. He was the clubhouse leader after starting nine shots from the lead. Extraordinary on a day when someone shot 61.

Jones now had two holes to not lose his head. Pars on the 17th and 18th would bring him the Open. There was one hitch. Spieth had stayed on six-under, parring four consecutive holes and he stood on the 18th knowing an eagle would take him to eight-under. If Jones could not improve his score a playoff was a possibility.

Jones by now had not given up but he was falling apart. Nothing was going where he wanted, doing what it was told. His drive on the 18th found a bunker on the left. He could not reach the green in two. Spieth, true to his mundane round so far, mis-hit a fairway wood to four metres. On any other day an eagle was a given.

Jones bumped his ball out of the bunker and then hit a third that initially he wished he hadn’t. It required a deal of assistance from the wind to avoid the water. Now he was two putts from victory. Barely thinking, his first putt was timid and crawled to within a metre. Spieth’s eagle putt was never going in, giving away the cup early in its roll and slipped well left.

Jones now had a putt the length of which sends normally sensible men and women to join the croquet club. He didn’t want to hit the ball and barely did. It trickled towards the hole, caught enough of the left lip to succumb to gravity. The Open spoke loud and joyously, no code breaker required. A tournament, an Open that he dreamt of was his despite a determined attempt to throw it away. Still Jones deserved his win. The best player for three days and just about the worst for one.

But that’s the problem watching these golfers. You need eyes in the back of your head.