Winded Els Struggles to Beat Count

No one said that defending the Open Championship was supposed to be easy, but this was ridiculous. Ernie Els will have his work cut out this morning if he is to survive into the weekend let alone stay in touch.

The buffeted links of Royal St George's ran out winners by a knockout on forgettable day of drudgery. As days in the office go this was the equivalent of catching up with the filing and dealing with an overflowing in-tray. Fun was in short supply.

Els's round was a strip of black and blue numbers, as if supporters of Internazionale were manning the scoreboard. Not a single splash of red for a birdie, no sign of the orange of eagles. There were seven bogeys in his 78, four of them before the turn, by which time the gloom had descended over his playing partners as well as the big South African himself.

Given that David Toms is also the winner of a major and Shigeki Maruyama smiled his way to fifth place in last year's Open, their collective score of 28 over par was a dismal offering, at that stage better only than the 31 over of the group comprising Hideto Tanihara, Jerry Kelly and Rory Sabbatini.

By the time Els bogeyed the long and treacherous 14th, the crowds had begun to drift away. It must be hard to maintain focus when everything points to getting the job done as quickly as possible and getting out of there.

Last year, though, when the gales swept in on the Saturday afternoon and turned the Muirfield leaderboard upside down and inside out, showed what can happen. No player of quality within seven or eight shots of the real, as opposed to the numerical, lead - no one imagines that Hennie Otto is this year's champion in waiting - can say he is truly out of it.

But to hang in there Els had to make sure he finished strongly. By now, though, the wind was gathering itself for a grand, blustering, trouserflapping finale and the last four holes would be brutal.

The 475 yards of the 15th hole, on the upper edge of a par four, was covered with a drive to the left rough and a punched iron that found the left edge of the green. Els needed to hole from eight feet for his par and, after pulling away once as the wind almost blew him off balance, he rolled in the putt.

It was something he had been unable to do in the early part of his round. "I threw a lot of shots away on the greens early," he said afterwards. "It was tough staying steady over the putts and there were three three-putts on the front nine and a couple of makeable birdies."

A soaring iron straight into the teeth of the gale on the short 16th gave him a birdie opportunity from 15 feet but, to the chagrin of a group of his relatives who were following the match, the putt rolled agonisingly past.

He missed the fairway to the right on the 17th, but was fortunate to find the trampled spectator path from where he was able to find the area to the front of the green. His chip was a little too tentative, but to his relief he holed that putt too for another par.

If that was a scramble, few will have played the 18th better all day. His drive was long and if not on the fairway was merely in the first cut of rough, from where he hit a majestic shot, passing the pin and nestling just off the green. The putt left him a tap-in.

"The only thing we didn't get today was rain, thank goodness," he said. "We knew before we started that if we got tough conditions this course was going to be a problem. It is going to be hard to rescue it from here but if I can finish this event in even par that will be a good effort, I guess."