Bluffers’ Guide to The Open golf: the stats you need to pick this weekend’s winner

The greatest golfers have gathered at Royal Troon for The Open. Who is best equipped to win in the wind and rain? Martin Bly may know

A very narrow window of relaxation opens this weekend for football bluffers, who can content themselves with idle speculation about transfers until the Premier League (and its essential Bluffers’ Guide) return in a month.

The dedicated general sporting Bluffer needs no rest, however, and there could be no greater opportunity for parading arcane sporting knowledge than golf’s great Open, already underway at Royal Troon in bonny, brutal Scotland.

First of all, the golfing bluffer - like the golfer - must respect the course, and Troon is idiosyncratic even by the standards of The Open. It hosts both the shortest and longest holes on any course that hosts The Open: Postage Stamp, the par three 8th, is just 123 yards, while the par five 6th, called Turnberry, is no less than 601 yards - demonic even when the wind drops, as it did - unusually - on the opening day this year.

Understandably, perhaps, such an unusual challenge tends to throw up unusual, even unique results: the last three winners of The Open at Royal Troon, Mark Calcavecchia, Justin Leonard and Tom Hamilton, have never won another major in their careers to date.

Luck with the weather - in particular wind and rain - is an important factor, accentuated, bluffers can point out, by the single-tee start which means that golfers can be required to be on the course in the early morning and late evening. Experience, wisdom and guile can pay dividends on Open courses, as witnessed by the triumphs of Darren Clarke, at 42, and Phil Mickelson, at 44. Gene Sarazen made a hole in one at the Postage Stamp in the 1973 Open at the age of 71.

Bluffers wishing to advance the “experience counts” theory could venture to suggest that 49-year-old Steve Stricker may have some of the qualities required. He was second the last time out in the St Jude Classic, and has finished in the top ten in eight major tournaments since he turned 40. Mickelson’s extraordinary opening round this year, a Royal Troon record 63, adds to the case for the golden oldies.

The Open has been held eight times at Troon, and while you might expect grizzled Scots to have prevailed in fact fully six of those events have been won by Americans. The weight of history helps the Scottish all-time Open total to 41 wins, second only to the USA with 44.

When holding forth about the current contenders, bluffers should arm themselves with statistics relevant to the challenging conditions. Ideally, the bluffer will be recommending a player with proven recent ability to hit long, accurate drives, get on to the greens without tempting Troon’s savage gorsey rough, and then tidy up quickly.

Jason Day, for example, the World No 1, has a healthy 2016 drive average of 301.2 yards and averages just 27.91 putts per round. But his driving accuracy is not the best, at 54 per cent. Ireland’s Shane Lowry would relish any tricky conditions and he hits the fairways more often than Day, averaging 62 per cent in accuracy with drives that average just a shade under 300 yards.

Dustin Johnson had a fairly undistinguished opening round in level par on Thursday, but bluffers would do well to take note of his statistics this year, as his strengths may well come into play if the weather worsens over the weekend.

He is not to everyone’s taste, but Johnson’s driving average this year is just over 312 yards, he has hit 67.86 per cent of his greens in 2016 in regulation, and he is currently averaging just 28.46 putts per round. He has also, bluffers may like to conclude, got the monkey off his back by winning this year’s US Open.