MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

What are your expectations over how your home course is likely to look this April when pristine Augusta National hits our screens and golfers begin eyeing up the new season? By then, the keen TV golf fan will have been fed a steady diet of visual perfection from Hawaii, California, Florida, the Middle East and South Africa, where the climates are more kindly disposed towards course presentation from December to March than within these shores.

It’s a completely unfair comparison, but sadly, one that some golfers still make as they head out excitedly once the Green Jacket has been draped around someone’s shoulders. “Augusta does give a false impression,” Lucy Sellick, head greenkeeper at Wenvoe Castle Golf Club in South Wales, tells me. “Temperature-wise it’s hugely different; the inputs and nutrient levels are hugely different;