Matt Fitzpatrick in blast at 'pathetic' PGA Tour over sweeping golf changes

Matt Fitzpatrick has slammed the PGA Tour over their decision to reduce field sizes.

The Englishman joined former US Open champion Lucas Glover in his hammering of the golfing body over the sweeping set of changes to golf, which were confirmed on Monday. Glover hit out at what he described as "cool kid meetings" between Jordan Spieth, Patrick Cantlay, Tiger Woods and other big-name golfers. The move aims to speed up the pace of play.

"I think it’s terrible," he said. "And then hiding behind pace of play, I think, challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid. Don’t cut fields because it’s a pace of play issue. Tell us to play faster, or just say you’re trying to appease six guys and make them happy so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf."

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Fitzpatrick, 30, took to X (formerly Twitter), to voice his own anger at how the issue has been handled.

He said: "He’s so right. Pathetic that pace of play is spoken about every year and nothing ever gets done."

The PGA Tour's senior vice-president of rules and competition, Gary Young, is adamant the changes will speed up the pace of play despite the protests. He told Golfweek: "It’s something that we’ve been saying for years that 156-man fields are too many players. It’s basically 78 players in a wave, 13 groups per side and our pace of play is set somewhere around four-and-a-half hours. You do the math and if they play in time par, which is basically two hours and 15 minutes, they make the turn and all of a sudden the group ahead of them is just walking off the tee because there’s two hours and 12 minutes of tee times.

"You do the math and if they play in time par, which is basically two hours and 15 minutes, they make the turn and all of a sudden the group ahead of them is just walking off the tee because there’s two hours and 12 minutes of tee times. As we talked it through with the players on that subcommittee, there was agreement in the room that you would never build it so that groups would be turning and waiting at the turn.

"The whole idea of 144 being our maximum field size, everyone felt that that was the right number, and the mathematics on it worked. You’ll see that some of our other fields have been reduced even further and that’s due to time constraints."