Slow play speeds to top of the agenda

On the day that the Royal and Ancient confirmed they could not act decisively enough to bring in drug testing at this year's Open Championship, the game's governing body at least expressed a commitment to eradicate the curse of slow play.

Having watched in despair - not to mention boredom - as the final two-ball took five hours, 10 minutes to complete the final round of the Masters earlier this month, the R&A realised something must be done about what Peter Dawson, their chief executive, agreed was rapidly turning into “a cancer in golf“.

At next months Players Championship in Florida, the world's leading tours will sit down together with the R&A and their American equivalent, the USGA, to discuss a variety of matters. At yesterday's press briefing at Royal Birkdale, the venue for July's Open, Dawson revealed that the R&A will put the slow-play problem somewhere near the top of their agenda.

The rules currently allow for “slow” players to be punished with fines and even, in extreme cases, penalty shots, although hitherto the authorities have plainly shied away from taking the hard line. If the R&A get their way, however, that could now all change. Dawson pointed to the decreasing numbers taking up golf and aired the commonly-held view that normal rounds of four hours plus is one of the factors driving people away.

"We are concerned about it," said Dawson at the links in Southport. "We saw some very slow play at the Masters and we are hoping to get a meeting of minds and some improvements. It's not just at major events. It's the effect it has at grassroots level. We'd like to look at educating players and penalising them. Without that it's hard to see it improving. And I think the elite amateur game has a piece of the blame because, anecdotally, coaches are encouraging complicated and time-consuming pre-shot routines.”

While this R&A move was promising, the decision to postpone the introduction of drug testing until the 2009 Championship was depressing as they missed the chance to become the first major to enforce the sport's soon-to-be-introduced anti-doping policy. Dawson, himself, admitted that the delay was "slightly unsatisfactory", but went on to explain that the Open's global qualifying system was to blame.

Events have already taken place in Asia, South Africa and Australia and not all players at these qualifiers have had the same education programme - as to what a player can and cannot take - open to those in Europe and America. "But we very much hope and intend to start next year,“ added Dawson. “If the Open was in October we would probably be drug-testing this year.”