Find Me a 100 Winner: Hot Herbert overlooked by the market

With the likes of Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and the brand-new US Open champion, Matt Fitzpatrick, all in attendance at this week's BMW PGA Championship, there are plenty of quality players trading at triple-figure odds and a case of sorts can be made for lots of outsiders in an event that's seen plenty of longshots win.

It's now seven years since Byeong-Hun An won at a whopping price but as highlighted in the preview, historically, it's been a very good event for outsiders and there was a four year stretch at the turn of the century when the winners were almost impossible to predict. Andrew Oldcorn, Anders Hansen, Ignacio Garrido and Scott Drummond all left punters scratching their heads.

The English have a cracking record, course form holds up really well and the key traditional stats are Greens In Regulation and Scrambling so Matt Cooper's each-way fancy, Eddie Pepperell, is my first and most straightforward selection.

Pepperell an obvious pick

Pepperell arrives this week with course form reading 6-21-72-MC-43-MC-6-W and current form reading 11-2-20-8-18 so after a long barren spell, the 31-year-old has hit a rich vein of form.

He ranked seventh for both GIR and Scrambling when finishing 22nd in Denmark last week and having won the British Masters at Walton Heath back in 2018, it's no surprise to see he has a couple of top-six finishes around Wentworth - another heathland circuit.

Back 2u Eddie Pepperell @ 100.099/1
Place order to lay 10u @ 10.09/1 & 10u @ 2.35/4

Hot Herbert overlooked

Given he's won two DP World Tour events and a PGA Tour event in the last 21 months, that he's finished inside the top-20 at the last two majors (13th at the US PGA Championship and 15th at the Open), and that he was a respectable 15th at the BMW Championship last time out, I was very surprised to be able to back the classy 26-year-old Australian, Lucas Herbert, at as big as 160.0159/1 here.

Herbert has played the event twice previously, in 2019 and 2020, and on both occasions he missed the cut so that's a big negative. The second of his two DP World Tour wins, however, came in the Irish Open at Mount Juliet last summer and that looks like a course that correlates really well so an improvement on his first two visits is very much expected.

BMW PGA winners Nick Faldo, Jose Maria Olazabal, Howard Clark, Bernhard Langer, and David Howell have all won or been placed at Mount Juliet. Thomas Bjorn, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh, who finished first second and third there in the 2002 American Express, have all contended in this event and they've also either won or been runner-up here in the now defunct World Match Play Championship.

It would be easy to argue that all of those players were extremely talented and that they could and would contend almost anywhere but Rikard Karlberg, who rarely contends anywhere, links the two tracks nicely as he's finished runner-up at both venues.

Back 2u Lucas Herbert @ 160.0159/1
Place order to lay 10u @ 10.09/1 & 10u @ 2.35/4

Kurt can contend again

Although he's yet to win this year, having finished third in the Honda Classic and second in both the Mexico and Scottish Opens, 29-year-old Californian, Kurt Kitayama, is enjoying a stellar year that has seen him rise to number 61 in the Official World Rankings.

He's missed his last two cuts at Wentworth, but he was 14th on debut in 2019 and he played nicely last time out when finishing 19th in the BMW Championship, where he ranked second for Putting Average. His general level of form is just too strong to ignore at 160.0159/1.

Back 2u Kurt Kitayama @ 160.0159/1
Place order to lay 10u @ 10.09/1 & 10u @ 2.35/4

Nicolai worth chancing at a huge price

Nicolai Hojgaard is a clumsy golfer, more than capable of throwing in the odd double or triple-bogey and he did himself no favours last week in his homeland when he began the Made in HimmerLand with a double-bogey at his second hole (the par five 11th).

He gave himself too much to do after that and his five-under-par 66 in round two wasn't quite enough to see him make the weekend but I'm happy to back the two-time winner again here at in excess of 200.0199/1.

The 21-year-old Dane is a rough diamond with plenty still to learn but he's a class act who will win plenty of tournaments and his 20th placed finish on debut last year suggests this is a course that might just suit.

He sat 10th and just four off the lead with a round to go before a 71 on Sunday saw him slip back but that was a decent enough performance given he'd won his first DP World Tour event a week earlier in Italy.

Back 1u Nicolai Hojgaard @ 240.0239/1
Place order to lay 10u @ 10.09/1 & 10u @ 2.35/4

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