Future Of UAE Golf Bright: Teens Beat Pros

It wasn't meant to be like this. Put 16 professionals up against 16 amateurs over two days of Ryder Cup-style match play, and the pros are bound to come out ahead. Right? You couldn't be more wrong.

The 21-11 scoreboard didn't lie. The Dubai Golf Trophy 2007 wasn't so much of a defeat for the Professional team as a hammering of epic proportions. And the great news for the future of UAE golf was that the stars of the Amateur side are mostly still at school.

Joel Neale, 15, won all three of his matches over two days of wonderful play at the Wadi by Faldo and Dubai Creek, while fellow teenagers Matthew Turner, Khalid Yousuf, Sean Thornberry and Eric Hesson made important contributions. Professional captain Alan Mackenzie was full of praise for the victors.

“I'm not going to make any excuses,'' he said. “They were better than us and deserved their victory. I think we are all surprised by the margin and it's a bit of a freak result. They were the better side but there were three or four matches that could have gone either way on the last day, and had they gone to us the score would have been about 18-14, and I think that would have been about right.''

MacKenzie admits his successor, the vice-captain this year Elliott Gray, will have to see some improvement from his side if they are to wrest the trophy back in 2008. “The guys can all play and they're all competitive.

But the pros spend a lot of time teaching others and being involved in the business side and they need to spend more time practising their own games. But in the end all you can do is try your best. It's a game and everyone should enjoy it.''

The UAE is blessed with some hugely talented teenagers at the moment. All seem to hit the ball prodigious distances off the tee, and they couple it with a great attitude and deft touch around the greens.

Mackenzie said: “The JDP [UAE Golf Association Junior Development Programme] had helped them immensely.
“Joel [Neale] has been with it five or six years. They get great coaching and superb practice facilities here. Joel was good last year as a 14-year-old. I remember in the singles he holed a 40-foot putt on the last against me.''

The match had long been won, but it was fitting that in the final singles John Mills, the only amateur to have played in all eight Dubai Golf Trophy matches, reeled off three birdies in a row from the 13th hole to lie dormy three. To his credit Jamie Wood fired in a birdie of his own on 16 to extend the contest, but Mills closed out on 17 for a 2 and 1 victory and the final point in the 21-11 rout.