Price will be paid as error is spotted

Welshman counts his blessings as Appleby's diligence saves him from the ignominy of joining Roe on the way out

Phillip Price certainly did not look a like a man who was lying three shots off the lead of The Open after a third-round 69. He looked more like a man who had just got away with murder. Which he had in golfing terms, if you take the application of the rules as piously as the Royal and Ancient seemingly do.

Price sighed, wiped the sweat from his brow, fidgeted in his chair and pulled at his shirt as the press gathered around him. And these were not simply the symptoms of the searing heat. Because Price had come within the tiniest whisker of becoming the second Briton within an hour to be disqualified from The Open.

He had committed the same offence as Mark Roe, in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same innocence, but was lucky that his playing partner is a something of a stickler when it comes to checking that everything is in order. Otherwise, the two leading Britons would have been heading out of the Sandwich gates on a technicality; a technical knockout as they were calling it here yesterday.

The Welshman and Appleby were playing four groups behind Roe and Jesper Parnevik. Price had no doubt cast an eye at the scoreboard as he played his way in and wondered why Roe's name had disappeared. Maybe this most focused of golfers simply put it out of his mind as he compiled a round of two-under that puts him bang in contention to cap a golden three-week period that has seen him win in Dublin a fortnight ago and come second at Loch Lomond last Sunday.

If he had taken the trouble to find out what had happened to the Yorkshireman then Price might have checked his card, too. He and Australia's Stuart Applebly had not swapped cards before their round either. Indeed, Appleby did not notice the error until they had signed them and were about to hand them in. "I was about to give the card to the official when I thought I'd just check the name on the top and I saw it wasn't mine - it was Phillip Price," Appleby said.

"I told Phillip and he was stunned. I asked the official what we should do and we were given brand new cards, and we finally got them right and both signed them. We were getting paranoid by this stage but we handed them in, and as we did that we were told that the two other players had been disqualified for the same thing." As they had not yet left the scorer's hut - unlike Roe and Parnevik - Price was handed an escape route from ignominy. "We did a very similar thing to Mark and Jesper, but luckily Stuart spotted it," said Price. "We had marked and signed our own cards and almost handed them in, and so we had to change everything over. It's amazing that would happen. I've been on tour a long time and the amount of times I have played, I have never done that before. I am very relieved because I'd have been disqualified if Stuart hadn't spotted it."

Appleby's eye for detail could just prove priceless to Price. Standing at two over, the 36-year-old is within three of Thomas Bjorn and still has it all to play for. He can only thank Appleby for that. "I was going through the usual routine of checking scores and had no problems so I signed the card," Appleby said. "I think we'd have been OK even if we'd handed in the wrong cards, because we hadn't left the booth and so we could have put it right, it was just that the other two guys had left the booth."

Appleby - who contested the four-man play-off at last year's Open - was worried that several other players on the course might be in the same predicament because the system of giving players their cards before the round differed on the European Tour to the US Tour. "As far as I know it is standard practice on the US Tour and everywhere else I have played to be given the other guy's card before the round," he said. "I remember swapping cards in the first round but I don't remember swapping at all in the second. I don't know what European Tour practice is, but if it is to get your own card and swap, then maybe we are not the final ones you will be talking to about this."

Parnevik was similarly bemused by The Open's way of doing things. "In the US if you're playing with Lehman and Leonard they hand me Tom's card etc," he said. "Here you always get your own card and you have to exchange it. I thought the caddies did, so did Roey probably. I don't even know why they bother having scorecards anymore. Man, you can try to foot it out the rough and get a one-shot penalty, you can sign the wrong card and get disqualified. It's stupid." Just ask Mark Roe and Phillip Price exactly how stupid.