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Bluffers’ Guide to the sporting weekend: vital stats on golf’s minor major and F1’s high-speed Germans

Football continues in friendly fantasy-land while golf and F1 get real. Martin Bly has the facts at his fingertips

The last of this year’s golf majors, the US PGA, is upon us in double-quick time in order to allow (some of) the game’s greats to head to Brazil for the sport’s controversial Olympic debut. The PGA is felt by many to be the most minor of the majors, but it still counts for the record books and bluffers will want to have their opinions sharpened and ready for use as the final two rounds get under way at Baltusrol.

They might start by pointing out that the last four majors have all been won by players who had never previously secured a major title. Who are the likeliest non-major winners to continue that trend? Bluffers could suggest three with excellent credentials, but no big title in the bag.

Rickie Fowler, for example, is currently ranked No 7 in the world and is the only player in the world’s top nine who has yet to bag a major. He is one of only four men to have had top-five finishes in every major in a calendar year – the others are Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth, so Fowler is in good company.

There are two more names who often come up in this context, and have become the modern era’s most celebrated near-miss merchants: Lee Westwood and Sergio Garcia. The Englishman has 18 top ten finishes in majors, including second places at the Open at St Andrews in 2010, at Augusta the same year and at the Masters this April.

Garcia has an even more remarkable 22 top ten finishes in majors without lifting a big one, and was second at the US PGA at Medinah in 1999 and at Oakland Hills in 2008. So he is just about due another strong run.

The other major sporting event this weekend is the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, the first time the circus has visited the truncated remains of the once great blast through the forest since 2014. The latest version of the track is a shadow of its former self but F1 bluffers will be aware that the layout at least permits plenty of overtaking – 67 successful moves the last time F1 was here.

Nico Rosberg won the last German GP and he will be hoping to become the first-ever German to win back-to-back home races – a feat that eluded Michael Schumacher and has so far been beyond Sebastian Vettel. The latter’s Ferrari team are enduring troubled times, so fans of the Scuderia will be heartened to hear bluffers points out that the team has scored points in every race at Hockenheim since 1987, and will surely do so again this weekend.

Meanwhile on Planet Football, the summer transfer season, particularly that element of it we are currently enduring before the season itself starts, is a challenging time for bluffers because the market produces so many fantasies and non-stories that the line between truth and nonsense becomes irretrievably blurred.

Seasoned bluffers might do well to parade their powers of recall and ask their audiences if they can remember anything of note achieved last season by this quartet, who all arrived in the Premier League last summer to splash headlines: Oumar Niasse (Lokomotiv Moscow to Everton); Florian Thauvin (Marseille to Newcastle); Baba Rahman (Augsburg to Chelsea) and Gianelli Imbula (Porto to Stoke).

Friends might wonder if this is a trick question. Did they all score last-minute winners in vital cup-ties? Or from penalties after coming on as substitutes? Did they make vital tackles or goal-line interceptions? Well no, what they have in common is that they all achieved next to nothing. And between them they cost £69.7 million.