Find me a 100 winner - John Bickerton

Find Me A 100 Winner / Paul Krishnamurty / 23 October 2007 /

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Englishman's got the smarts to pull off a big win

We're getting closer! Finding the elusive three-figure winner is becoming a frustrating affair, but the seven selections I've made since starting this column have all shortened in the betting during their first round, so at least there have been some trading successes. Most recently, Ross Fisher looked a very serious contender all weekend at The Portugal Masters until deciding to leave the putter at home on Sunday and frustratingly even missed a top-five finish. Hopefully a change of luck is around the corner.

This week's selection is John Bickerton, currently trading around 100 to win the Mallorca Classic. Bickerton's profile is remarkably similar to last week's big-priced winner Steve Webster. Both of these Englishmen developed slightly unjust reputations as bottlers during a long winless spell from the mid-1990s. In Webster's case, the drought ended last year in Italy, and he proved that winning gets easier once you've done it before with a superb performance in Portugal over the weekend.

Though Bickerton did win a minor event in 1994, he had to wait until 2005 for another European Tour victory and had very much become a player to avoid when in contention on the final day. He finally answered his critics with a nerveless, front-running success to win the 2005 Open de Canarias and proved that was no fluke by winning the much more competitive and lucrative French Open the following season.

The fact that one of those wins came in Spain bodes well for the task ahead this weekend in Mallorca. Bickerton also tends to thrive on courses that favour accuracy from tee to green, and Pula is very much a course in that vein. On his sole previous visit he finished a decent 11th in 2005.

There's nothing wrong with his recent form either. Prior to last week's missed cut in Portugal, he'd made the previous six cuts registering four top-25 finishes. Encouragingly, he ranked in the top-25 for driving accuracy in every one of those tournaments. He can even be forgiven last weekend's failure on an unsuitable target golf track, with a reasonable second-round 69 confirming that his game is in decent enough shape.

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