Best bets
3pts each-way Hideki Matsuyama @ 8/1
2pts each-way Collin Morikawa @ 7/1
0.5pt each-way Min Woo Lee @ 28/1
0.5pt each-way Ryo Hisatsune @ 100/1
Place FIVE pre-tournament bets and get an in-play matched FREE BET! T&Cs apply.
Hideki Matsuyama is a sporting god in Japan and the 2021 Masters champion can reward his legion of followers with a second victory in the ZOZO Championship when the PGA Tour pays its annual visit to that golf-crazy country this week.
It’s a limited field of 78 at the Narashino Golf Club in the Greater Tokyo Area of Chiba but a high-class reunion with an elite field headed by world No. 2 Xander Schauffele, who won Olympic gold in Tokyo, Matsuyama who inflicted a rare defeat on world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler in the Presidents Cup the last time we saw him, and Collin Morikawa, the defending champion.
‘The M-Factor – Matsuyama, Morikawa and Min Woo Lee – should have a big say on the outcome.’
There’s a strong supporting cast too battling it out for an $8.5m purse ($1.53m to the winner) with punters guaranteed a four-day run for their money as there’s no halfway cut. Don’t wait for Thursday to place your bets because the nine-hour time difference means the first round will be well under way by the time you wake up.
The M-Factor – Matsuyama, Morikawa and Min Woo Lee – should have a big say on the outcome on the parkland Accordia course, just a 7079-yard par 70 but tricky enough to produce hard-fought winning scores of 14, 15 and 15 under par the past three years.
Last year Morikawa’s 14-under saw him streak home by six and he arrives on the back of a formidable four-out-of-five Presidents Cup performance.
No one will be trying harder as the notable omission on his 2024 CV is a W. As second place at the Tour Championship preceded his Presidents supershow, not even dual Major champion Schauffele will be teeing up with greater confidence.
Of Chinese-Japanese descent, there is nobody bar their hero Matsuyama the locals would love to see win more than the boyish-looking Californian but Hideki, as a ten-time PGA Tour champion and eight-time winner in Japan, is a formidable obstacle.
Injury-prone though he is, Matsuyama keeps producing golf of the highest order and just when some of us were thinking he was on the slide, back he bounced with victories at Riviera and St Jude. In the disappointment of that hefty Presidents Cup defeat for the Internationals, Matsuyama’s last-green victory over Scheffler in Montreal didn’t get the praise it deserved but it was nonetheless a mighty achievement.
Only Tiger Woods beat him at the inaugural ZOZO in 2019 and when he did win two years later, there was no messing about – he destroyed his rivals to win by five and more.
With Schauffele’s ZOZO best only a T9 he looks a favourite to take on despite his annus mirabilis and one who won’t be frightened by him is cocky Min Woo Lee, woefully underused in the Montreal match, who has a point to prove and was T6 last year.
Like Morikawa, the 26-year-old Aussie has gone through the year without a W and the same goes for Justin Thomas and Sahith Theegala. That trio will really be up for this and are loaded with talent as well as compelling course form, JT as runner-up to Patrick Cantlay in 2020, Theegala as T5 to Keegan Bradley in 2022.
Theegala we know to be in fine form after his Tour Championship third and while it’s been the worst year of Thomas’s career, encouraging whispers have been heard and didn’t someone once say, form is temporary, class is for ever?
Korean aces Sungjae Im and Si Woo Kim, the star of the losing Internationals, come into the mix too but looking too far down the list may not be a good plan as the cream tends to rise to the top at the ZOZO, four of the five winners to date, Woods, Cantlay, Matsuyama and Morikawa, have all come out of the top drawer.
Japan has another possible contender in Ryo Hisatsune, a DP World Tour winner who has shone twice in this tournament, T12 and T6, while last year’s joint runner-up Beau Hossler has been showing some flashy recent form and holds each-way potential.
Hisatsune, only 21 when he won last year’s French Open and a real talent, has not had an easy time of it in the States but there was light at the end of the tunnel with third place at the Wyndham and his course form is first-rate. There are worse 100/1 shots but there are so many good names for him to overcome.
Best bets
2pts each-way Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen @ 25/1
2pts each-way Byeong-Hun An @ 7/1
1pt each-way Johannes Veerman @ 28/1
0.5pt each-way Tom Vaillant @ 50/1
Now and then a golf tournament comes along where putting up one selection, never mind four, is like drawing teeth, something that has to be done but painful to do. So it is with the Genesis Championship at the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea at Incheon, this week’s DP World Tour/Korean Tour co-promotion.
Not to be confused with the Genesis Invitational on the PGA Tour, it’s a name change from last year’s Korea Championship when French veteran Pablo Larrazabal suddenly rediscovered his game to win again.
Nothing in his previous 15 starts suggested the victory and it’s the same this year with six missed cuts from his last nine starts. But that’s Pablo for you – once he gets the bit between his teeth he’s very hard to stop.
‘The market is dominated by two high-class Koreans, who will have the crowd behind them and may simply be too good.’
The market is dominated by two high-class Koreans, Tom Kim and Ben An, who will have the crowd behind them and may simply be too good. Yet I find it hard to back at single-figure odds players who missed the cut last time out, no matter how unthreatening the opposition appears to be.
If you take the 7/1 for An you are backing a player who has not won since the 2015 BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. It’s a sobering thought.
And Kim’s Las Vegas flop was all the more mysterious as he was trying to win the Shriners for a third straight year. Both played their hearts out for the Internationals at the Presidents Cup but came away with precious little, a point and a half apiece. Kim was great at whipping up the crowd, less effective with his golf clubs. The bottom line is that at 22 he’s finding the game harder than he thought.
Why are they so short? Because their chief rivals are struggling at the end of a long season. Nicolai Hojgaard’s top-20s in Andalusia and Paris were riddled with mistakes and he’d missed four out of six cuts before that.
Yannik Paul’s second in France was encouraging but was followed by a missed cut at Sotogrande and the German has not made the progress expected of him; Keita Nakajima and Giulio Migliozzi are winners this year but a long time ago and have done precious little since; Sebastian Soderberg was out at halfway in Andalusia. The list goes on…
So I’m taking a punt on Challenge Tour graduate Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen who has quickly made his mark in just five starts in this superior grade. The 25-year-old Dane’s fifth in the Dunhill Links, 13th in Spain and 18th in France after a trio of Challenge victories were indicative of a young man going places. He clearly knows how to win and, unlike many bigger names, he carries no baggage with him.
Johannes Veerman doesn’t sound American but he is and this 32-year-old who won the Czech Masters in 2021 and then lost his game is coming back with a vengeance. His 14th at Sotogrande on Sunday backed up by five earlier top-tens suggest a victory is just around the corner. He has solid each-way credentials.
Tom Vaillant, Casey Jarvis and 125/1 shot Alfredo Garcia-Heredia all have bits of form and Eddie Pepperell is too talented to be out with the washing at 150/1 so we may be in for another turn-up.
French journeyman Julien Guerrier’s 66/1 triumph at Sotogrande after a record-equalling nine-hole playoff with Jorge Campillo could well inspire 22-year-old compatriot Vaillant who looked a decent prospect when seventh at the all-star Dunhill Links pro-am. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had back-to-back winners from France as David Ravetto and Frederic Lacroix did just that in August.
After a blank year, the two Korean stars will be more concerned about the W than the $4m prize money and the long-driving An may be better suited to this 7470-yard par 72 than his buddy Tom. His once-dodgy putting is more reliable these days and it’s hard to see him out of the frame. As for the win, it’s such a long time between drinks that would be a bonus.
Play starts at 11.10pm on Wednesday (U.K. and Ireland time) so get those bets on ASAP!
For all your bets on the golf, visit our dedicated golf betting page.
