Damien McGrane and Michael Hoey kick-off the 2011 Season this week at the Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek Country Club in Malelane in South Africa.
Joining them will be Gary Murphy and Jonathan Caldwell - who recently missed out at European Tour Qualifying School Stage 2 in Spain.
Open Champion Louis Oosthuizen will help get The 2011 Race to Dubai underway this week when he headlines the field for the Alfred Dunhill Championship, his first full-field event on home soil since lifting the Claret Jug at St Andrews in July.
The dust has barely settled on a 2010 campaign widely recognised as the greatest in the history of The European Tour and two players who made such a contribution to that success stand out in this week’s field – Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel.
Oosthuizen’s Major Championship victory helped him finish tenth on The 2010 Race to Dubai while Schwartzel finished two places ahead of him in eighth.
Schwartzel was certainly the fastest out of the blocks last year, claiming two wins and a second in the first four events of the 2010 season before collecting another runners-up finish a few weeks later in the WGC – CA Championship. In last year’s Alfred Dunhill Championship, his bold bid to win the title for a second time, having previously tasted glory in 2005, came up just short as the title went to Spain’s Pablo Martin.
Schwartzel, a five-time European Tour champion, will be hoping to go one better this year at the €1million event, which is being played at Leopard Creek Country Club for the seventh season in succession.
Martin, however, will be looking to rewrite the history books once again when he defends his title. Twelve months ago he became the first player to win on The European Tour as a professional having previously triumphed as an amateur, and the man from Malaga is now bidding to become the first player to successfully defend the Alfred Dunhill Championship title.
Two years after winning the Estoril Open de Portugal as a fresh-faced amateur, Martin, who signed for a stunning round of 63 on the second day, held off a rampaging Schwartzel on the final day to take the title by a single stroke.
Four other former champions are bidding for a repeat success - 2009 Champion Richard Sterne of South Africa, Englishmen John Bickerton (2008) and Anthony Wall (2000) and Germany’s Marcel Siem (2004).
This week’s tournament also gives last season’s Challenge Tour graduates the opportunity to get off to a fast start in their bid to keep The European Tour cards they earned through finishing in the top 20 of the Rankings.
Alvaro Velasco of Spain will aim to follow in the spikemarks of Italian Edoardo Molinari, his predecessor as Number One, whilst the rookie trio of Englishman Matt Haines, Denmark’s Thorbjørn Olesen and Dutchman Floris de Vries, who followed Velasco home in the Rankings, will be hoping to transfer the scintillating form they showed during their maiden seasons on the Challenge Tour onto The European Tour.
The event is the first of four tournaments in South Africa co-sanctioned with the Sunshine Tour, with the South African Open Championship, the Africa Open and the Joburg Open to follow in the coming weeks.
Designed by the legendary Gary Player, the 7,249 yards, par 72 parkland course at Leopard Creek Country Club is located in the heart of Malelane, on the southern border of the Kruger National Park.
The club takes its name from the river which runs through the course, which is home to a large number of crocodiles. As well as crocodiles, sightings of giraffes, hippo, antelope, buffalo and wild boar are also commonplace on one of South Africa’s most scenic courses.
