Written by Stephen Moloney (www.twitter.com/TheCheeky9)
When I wrote my last ‘Scout Report’ on Shane Lowry, I mentioned in the very first line how strange it was that I had to write one at all about the current Champion Golfer of the Year, as, from a cursory glance, he appeared to be the kind of player who should have, at this stage in his career, at least three Ryder Cup appearances under his belt.
Well, replace ‘Shane Lowry’ with ‘Bernd Wiesberger’ and ‘current Champion Golfer of the Year’ with ‘current Italian Open champion’ in that above paragraph, and you’ve got exactly how I think about the Austrian.
I mean, you take a look at his record on tour and you struggle to see how Bernd hasn’t been in at least one Ryder Cup team. He’s won seven times on tour; twice in 2012, then 2015, 2017 and, of course, the three wins he’s managed to notch up this year. And, barring last year when he was sidelined for the majority of the season, he hasn’t finished outside the Top 40 in the Race to Dubai rankings since 2011, with his best finish, ninth, coming in both 2015 and 2016.
So, what exactly has happened? How has a serial winner and a seemingly consistent player like Bernd never been fitted out for a Team Europe polo? Well, it appears to have been a case of bad timing and, to blatantly contradict my last sentence, a little bit of inconsistency.
See, despite winning twice in 2012, Bernd didn’t do enough over the course of that year’s qualification period to crack the top seven in the European Points List, nor the top twelve on the World Points List, so automatically qualifying for Medinah was never really in the equation. And, given he’d only reclaimed his European Tour card the previous year and subsequently finished 64th in the ‘Race to Dubai’ to keep it, he would have had to have been playing some form of “other-worldly” golf to merit getting one of Olazábal’s picks – which he wasn’t.
Gleneagles in 2014? He didn’t win in either 2013 or 2014, so that’s never going to help; didn’t do enough to crack the automatic qualification places in either the European or World Points list through consistency; nor was he playing so well to warrant a ‘pick’, as his 39th place finish in the ‘Race to Dubai’ would attest to.
Hazeltine in 2016? Over that two year period, Bernd was probably playing some of his most consistent golf. He won the ‘Open de France’ in 2015 (though it was outside the qualification period – bad timing) and, like I said earlier, he recorded his best ever finishes in the ‘Race to Dubai’ with a 9th place finish in both 2015 and 2016. Again, however, despite that good play, when it came to the qualifying period, Bernd never really threatened breaking into either the European or World Points Lists, finishing 22nd and 26th respectively in both of them.
And Paris in 2018? Well, that was just pure hard luck for Bernd. He badly injured his wrist in April 2018 and missed, not only the rest of the qualification period, but the rest of the 2017-18 season. And, the thing is, he’d been doing fairly well up until the injury. He’d played fifteen events since qualifying had started at the ‘D+D Real Czech Masters’ in 2017, and in those fifteen events he’d notched up a record of 2 Top 10’s, 2 Top 20’s, 1 Top 25, 1 Top 30, 4 finishes outside the Top 30 and 5 missed cuts. Like, that’s not a mind-blowing string of results by any means, but it might have served as a solid base from which to build upon and move hard during the summer – a move he, obviously, never got to make.
So, when you look at all that, it becomes apparent that, despite having had a very successful career so far on paper, when it comes to actually ‘doing enough’ to get into the Ryder Cup team, Bernd … well, hasn’t. He has the potential to be in the team, most definitely – as his three selections to appear in the Royal Trophy and EurAsia Cup (which superseded the Royal Trophy) would point to – but he just needs to do more to make that final step-up to the big show.
And as we move forward towards the end of this season and then migrate into next year and deeper into the qualification period, I think that’s going to be Bernd’s biggest challenge. He has to do more. He has to find that extra gear to force himself into those automatic qualification places because he hasn’t got that cache of past glories in the Ryder Cup to see him get a pick like other players in his age bracket. Basically, he has to take the decision out of Harrington’s hands.
What will be the biggest hurdle, in my opinion, in achieving that goal will be how Bernd manages the, always tricky, transition from the end of one season into another. Because, undoubtedly, he’s having something of a ‘career year’ in 2019 with those three wins (‘Made in Denmark’, ‘Scottish Open’ and ‘Italian Open’) seeing him currently sitting atop the Race to Dubai. Once this season comes to a close, however, and he takes an inevitable break from the game, the form that he’s been in this year can be quite difficult to recapture. So, whilst he’s sitting pretty in second place on the European Points List right now, that’s nothing a slow start to 2020 won’t be long eroding if he’s not careful.
But if Bernd does manage to do enough to make it to Wisconsin (and avoiding re-injuring that wrist will play a big role in whether or not that happens) Harrington will have a very capable player in his ranks.
Now, it has to be said that Bernd doesn’t exactly leap off the page when it comes to a ‘stats’ perspective. For instance, taking this season as an example, despite having three wins, when it comes to the main statistics players are judged in, he’s only in the top 20 in one of them, with a figure of 72.78% in ‘Greens in Regulation’ seeing him in 18th place on tour.
But it’s that very fact which I think serves as a massive plus in the case for Bernd as a potential Ryder Cup player. Yes, he’s not leading the tour in any of the ‘stats’, but, in reality, he is leading in the most important category – wins. Because it’s all well and good having good numbers and topping this category and that category, but “good stats” alone don’t put trophies on your mantelpiece. All that matters is, whatever condition your game is in, can you figure out a way to string it all together over four rounds in any given week and do what’s necessary to get that ‘W’ – and Bernd has shown repeatedly that he most certainly does.
So, yes, he hits a lot of greens; his putting is sound; and he’s reasonably long off the tee. Those are all true. But it’s the fact Bernd has experience of going out on a Sunday and finding a way to end up walking away with a trophy which, for me, could be his biggest weapon heading into a Ryder Cup. Because that’s what those three days are all about. It doesn’t matter what state your game is in, whether you’re firing on all cylinders or riding that knife-edge where you’re just about holding it all together, you have to go out and – under the most pressure you’re probably ever going to feel on a golf course – try and find a way to not walk away from any session empty-handed.
And if you put Bernd Wiesberger in that situation out in Wisconsin next year?
I think he does find a way.
It’s just a question now of whether or not he can finally find a way to actually make it there.