Australian PGA Championship Each-Way Tips: Jeunghun back with a Wang

• Korea's Jeunghun Wang is hungry to revive his career

• Min Woo Lee's record has been relentless down under

• Cam Smith and others casting the LIV shadow over golf once more

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Main Bet: Jeunghun Wang 1pt each-way @ 33/1

A new season but the same shadow continues to cast darkness over the DP World Tour.

Because the Australian PGA Championship will feature home nation LIV Golf rebels and what has happened to them, and the game, in the last 12 months is a subject that will be discussed and argued throughout the week.

Cameron Smith, a two-time winner of this event when it was played at Royal Pines, kicked off his 2022 with a superb win in Hawaii, he added PLAYERS Championship triumph, very nearly won the Masters and then claimed glory at the Open yet he is trundling backwards in the world rankings owing to his allegiance to Greg Norman's breakaway.

The defending champion has had an even more peculiar 12 months.

When Jed Morgan won on this course by a whopping 11 shots in January Geoff Ogilvy compared his feat (and promise) with the arrival of Norman on the Aussie golf scene in the 1970s.

The 22-year-old also allied himself with LIV and landed a first top 20 on that circuit in the final individual event in Jeddah, welcome relief for him from a mid-summer spell when he broke 76 in just two of 11 consecutive laps (and only then with 74s).

On to happier matters, this is the first time the event has been back as a DP World Tour co-sanctioned event since 2019 and the five editions with that status were all much like this week in terms of field strength: a handful of Aussie stars, just a sprinkling of curious Europeans, a handful more of those for whom status demands that they make the long journey in order to get a start, and a lot of Australasian Tour members.

Of the first category we can count Adam Scott in addition to Smith and Marc Leishman, plus Lucas Herbert, Min Woo Lee and the Kiwi Ryan Fox.

The Euros are led by the Hojgaard twins and Adrian Meronk with the likes of Richard McEvoy, Dave Horsey, Tom Lewis and Andrea Pavan biting the long haul bullet in their quest to get a start and improve on recent returns.

Among all of these tales, however, none quite compare with that of Korea's Jeunghun Wang.

Just 26 years old, he has packed an awful lot into his post-school life.

Ten years ago he finished fourth in the China Masters, he was a winner there in 2014, then superb throughout Asia in 2015 and 2016.

Midway through that latter year he won back-to-back on the DP World Tour in Morocco and Mauritius, and he was a fine champion at the Qatar Masters in 2017.

Late in 2018 I played a little table football with him and his caddie at the Turkish Airlines Open before we chatted about his form. He'd attempted a swing change and seemed pre-occupied - understandably - about his imminent national service.

His form picked up in 2019 but in late 2020 he said goodbye to golf for 18 months.

When he returned to action with 22nd on the Asian Tour in Singapore he gave an enigmatic description of his career interlude.

"It was a good experience, but it was too long," he said. "No freedom, so yeah, that's the hard thing. Just shooting guns every day, training every day. I didn't have any chance to practice any golf during this time. Actually, I thought I was going to play really bad last week in Singapore, but I'm still playing okay."

Since then he's been fifth on home soil, 23rd in Morocco and third last time out, when in the top 10 all week.

That's nice enough form and I like that Royal Queensland features no long grass. It's key defences are wind, bunkers and scrambling from short grass.

Wang's victory in Doha at the Qatar Masters was especially notable for his quality in all three of those elements.

Next Best: Min Woo Lee 2pt each-way @ 14/1

I was slightly tempted by the Scottish/Australian Connor McKinney who is just one of many talented amateurs based around Perth in Western Australia (McKinney won the Links Trophy from Adam Brady in the summer then Aldrich Potgieter won the Amateur Championship; they all play out of Joondalup GC).

The compiler likes him too and I'm wary at less than three figures but he might also like the course.

The top of the market is tight but I think Min Woo Lee offers a bit of something.

In his final appearance on home soil as an amateur the Western Australia-based Lee was fifth in the Perth International and it was a sign of things to come.

He's made six starts in Australia in the paid ranks, finished top five in five of them and won the Victorian Open. Even in the exception - a missed cut in the 2019 Australia Open - he had been sixth after 18 holes before getting the worst of the weather in the second lap.

He was third in this event at Royal Pines in 2019 and fourth here at Royal Queensland last year - in both weeks he spent all four rounds in the top 10.

He's also just ended the 2022 DP World Tour season in superb form with third at the Open de Espana and Andalucia Masters, ninth in the Nedbank Challenge and 12th last week in the DP World Tour Championship.

* Having difficulty working out the place returns? Fret no more - you can easily work out your returns with our new each way calculator.