Westwood's not in the groove

Lee Westwood crashed out of the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship thanks to a shocking round of 78 in the second round. Barely a couple of months ago he had demolished a top-class field to win the Race to Dubai. In the intervening period the pins have been moved, so to speak, as the rulemakers deemed the old U-shaped grooves - relatively wide and with sharp edges - were giving the players too much spin and outlawed them for professionals. Top players are likely to be able to adapt, but it seems Westwood has taken a little longer than anticipated – writes Peter Dixon in the Times

At the Dubai World Championship at the end of November, Lee Westwood demolished a stellar field with a display so good that it took the breath away. He knew that victory would bring him the inaugural Race to Dubai and he had no intention of playing second fiddle to anybody — and that included his main rival for the title, a young genius by the name of Rory McIlroy.

So when Rick Kulacz, a virtual unknown from Australia, moved to the top of the leaderboard yesterday at the Abu Dhabi Championship at the same time that Westwood was packing his bags after missing the cut, it was inevitable that questions would be asked. In particular, what had happened in the intervening weeks?

Westwood admitted that he was rusty after taking a six-week break from the game but had other thoughts on his mind. Namely that he had become the inadvertent victim of a change in the rules.

The rule in question has been exercising the minds of players and equipment suppliers for much of the past year. With fears that clubs were allowing players to generate too much spin, and thus control, from out of the rough, the R&A and the USGA, the game’s rules makers, decided that grooves on the clubs needed to be altered.

The penalty for missing fairways, it was argued, had been neutralised, allowing the long hitters an unfair advantage over shorter hitting, more accurate players. So from January 1, the old U-shaped grooves — relatively wide and with sharp edges — were outlawed for professionals, to be replaced by narrower grooves with rounded edges giving less bite.

While the vast majority of the leading players will be able to adjust to the changes pretty quickly, where Westwood came unstuck was that he had to change all the clubs in his bag and had given himself too little time to familiarise himself with them.

Many of his rivals, Ian Poulter among them, had already been using “conforming” irons towards the end of the year, the exception being their most lofted clubs, the sand irons and lob wedges.

Westwood, who followed up his first round of 69 with one of 78, ended the day on three over par, 15 shots behind Kulacz and 14 adrift of Sergio García, Shane Lowry and Peter Hanson. With four bogeys in the first four holes, he got off to the worst start imaginable and could not get back on track. He reached the turn in 40 and came home in 38. This was not the player we had seen a few weeks earlier.