Staged at DLF Golf & Country Club for the sixth year in a row, 120 players will line up for a shot at the crown.

A new No. 1 on the horizon?

As the LET enters the business end of the season with only four events remaining, there could be a new No. 1 in the Race to Costa del Sol standings come Sunday with several stars hot on Celine Boutier’s heels.

Boutier is absent in India meaning Sweden’s Johanna Gustavsson (second place) and home favourite Diksha Dagar (fourth place) could leapfrog the French Major winner with a solo second finish or better in India.

The pair are both within 320 points of Boutier — the number of points rewarded for finishing runner-up this week — with Gustavsson in hot form after landing her maiden LET title last month at the Ladies Open de France.

Elsewhere, Thai rookie Trichat Cheenglab, the winner of the Big Green Egg Open, could also jump to top spot with a second victory of the season this week.

Diksha Dagar. Ladies European Tour

Dagar eyes history

Speaking of Dagar, there’s more than just the Race to Costa del Sol on the line this week as the left-hander looks to become only the second Indian to win her home event.

The Olympian is enjoying her best season to date with six top-10 finishes and one victory at the Czech Ladies Open.

Well placed to land a second title of the season this week, history is as stake for Dagar as she looks to follow in the footsteps of Aditi Ashok (2016) and become the second domestic winner of the Hero Women’s Indian Open.

Local stars aiming to shine

Alongside Dagar an abundance of local stars will also be teeing up this week hoping to emulate Ashok’s heroics from seven years ago.

Just like in previous years, the 120-player strong field includes a group of players from the Women’s Golf Association of India (WGIA) – this year culminating in 35 members and 32 Indian golfers.

Aiming to make their mark on domestic soil are the likes of Seher Atwal, Tvesa Malik and Amandeep Drall, while Delhi’s own Vani Kapoor will be hoping to take advantage of teeing up at her home club.

Elsewhere, Avani Prashanth is also one to keep a close eye on, the 16-year-old amateur who became the first Indian to win on the LET Access Series in August when she landed the Ahlsell Final in Sweden.

Ladies European Tour

Delightful DLF

Last but not least, the stars of the LET will have to be at their creative best this week as they tackle one of the most unique courses on the calendar — DLF Golf & Country Club.

The Gary Player championship course — located in Gurgaon on the outskirts of New Delhi — is consistently ranked one of the best golf courses in India and features a spectacular amphitheatre design full of dramatic deep-faced bunkers, undulating fairways, water hazards and scenic tee shots.

With fairways narrow and several holes featuring sharp doglegs, finding the short cut will be crucial this week with the winner needing to be accurate off the tee.

With that in mind, players could be tempted to keep their drivers in the bag on this delightfully unique track.

The 72-hole, four day Hero Women’s Indian Open gets under way on Thursday.

Main image: Ladies European Tour

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By John Huggan
At the end of an extraordinary and ever-fluctuating day’s play on what is surely one of the game’s more extraordinary courses—the DLF Golf & Country Club in New Delhi—Stephen Gallacher somehow emerged as winner of the European Tour’s Hero Indian Open. The 44-year-old Scot made seven birdies in a closing 71, one under par over the Gary Player-design that some argue resembles something from Jurassic Park, to reach nine-under 279 for the week, one shot better than runner-up, Masahiro Kawamura. Spain’s Jorge Campillo was third, another stroke back.

Those rather bland numbers conceal much heartache, however. And carnage, from which even Gallacher was not immune. Courtesy of two lost balls, the eventual champion made a quadruple-bogey 8 on the 456-yard seventh. Still ahead by two shots with five holes to play, overnight leader Julian Suri needed six shots to get down from just off the green at the 461-yard 14th hole, the American running up Sunday’s second quad.

Those were not the highest scores of the day though. India’s Rahil Gangjee accumulated a sextuple-bogey 11 on the 624-yard closing hole, while Jens Dantorp of Sweden finished his round of 83 with three triple bogeys—there were nine in total—on the last five holes. In all, the 70-strong field amassed nine triple-bogeys and 46 doubles in increasingly blustery conditions that only accentuated the severe contours of the endlessly eccentric and speedy putting surfaces.

Eight men, including former European No. 1 Robert Karlsson, shot in the 80s; only seven managed to break 70, Campillo’s 67 the best of those.

None of which was bothering Gallacher, whose brilliant ball-striking and three birdies over the closing four holes was in stark contrast to the destruction surrounding him. Even then though, the former Ryder Cup player had to wait to see if his score would be good enough to give him a fourth tour victory and his first since the 2014 Dubai Desert Classic. Standing on the final tee, Kawamura needed to make a birdie to tie, an eventuality made all but impossible by a drive that finished unplayable. In the end, the 25-year-old from Japan, a graduate of last year’s qualifying school, holed from 20-feet for a par-5 to clinch second spot.

“It was a bit disappointing, to begin with,” admitted Gallacher, who had his 18-year-old son, Jack, as his caddie. “I got off to a ropey start. Five off the tee on seven wasn’t good. I was pretty calm even after that hole though. There’s nothing really much you can do other than keep hitting shots and focus on the process. To see that I was only five back gave me a wee bit of encouragement. I thought Just hang in there. When I birdied 15, I saw that Julian Suri had come back and then when I got to the 16th green I was tied for the lead. I just tried to finish as strong as I could and I did that.”

Gallacher poses with his 17-year-old son, Jack, who worked as his caddie en route to victory in India. (Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)

That he could do it with his son by his side made ending the victory draught all the more special.

“He’s a great caddie, quite chilled,” Gallacher said. “When you’re 44 you’re in the sort of twilight so it’s a big win for me. It was good to finish it out the way I did.”

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The cautious manner in which the now two-time champion, S.S.P. (Shiv Sankar Prasad) Chawrasia, played the final hole of the Hero Indian Open at the DLF Golf & Country Club aptly told the story of a somewhat wacky week and underlined the eccentricities of the Gary Player-designed layout.

Without ever leaving the fairway on the rock, rough and water-strewn 624-yard par 5, the diminutive Calcutta-native teed-off with a 3-wood, then hit sand wedge/8-iron/sand wedge to the green en-route to completing a seven-shot victory with a two-putt bogey 6.

And there’s more. On the previous hole, Chawrasia’s blind approach struck the massive rocks beyond the putting surface and rebounded safely onto the putting surface.

In contrast, his playing partner, Gavin Green of Malaysia, saw his second shot hit the railroad ties supporting the bank of a bunker and careen off into the spectacularly rocky hazard short and right of the green. Little wonder then that only seven men were under par at the end of an eventful four days in the Indian capital of New Delhi. And little wonder then that play was painfully slow, one understandably disgruntled competitor reporting that it took four hours to complete 12 holes on the rain-affected third day.

Still, none of the above should detract from the beautifully controlled performance put in by Chawrasia, one of the shorter hitters on the European circuit. That closing bogey was one of only six dropped shots recorded by the 39-year-old four-time European Tour champion. Remarkably too, all four have come both in his home country and the same city. The Delhi Golf Club was the scene of Chawrasia’s victories in the 2008 Indian Masters and 2016 Hero Indian Open. And now he has two wins at the DLF, the first the 2011 Avantha Masters.

Having predicted a winning score of 10-under-par at the beginning of the week, Chawrasia proved himself prescient as well as proficient by hitting that mark exactly with his closing 71. No one else was close. Green was alone in second place, one shot ahead of Scotland’s Scott Jamieson and former BMW PGA champion Matteo Manassero. Two of the only three players in the field ranked inside the world’s top 100—Rafa Cabrera-Bello of Spain and India’s Anirban Lahiri—were in the group of three tied for fifth spot.

SSP Chawrasia gained 275,828 points and made a massive jump in the European Tour’s Race to Dubai, moving from 194th to 18th position as he targets a debut appearance in the season-ending DP World Tour Championship from November 16-19 at Jumeirah Golf Estates in Dubai

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The 17-year-old Dubai-born Indian amateur has just secured an invite to next month’s Hero Indian Open on the back of his dream Omega Dubai Desert Classic debut.

It will be a fourth European Tour start for the MENA Tour history-maker who kicked on from a sensational opening 68 with rounds of 75-74-74 to finish T60 in the Desert Classic at Emirates GC earlier this month.

Thomas is sure to attract considerable attention when he tees it up at DLF Golf & Country Club in New Delhi after outscoring Tiger Woods by nine shots in the first round in Dubai en-route to making the cut as the two-time champion and former world No.1 sadly hobbled his way back to the U.S.

“I got the invite a couple of days ago so that’s pretty awesome,” said Thomas of the invite to the March 9-12 Indian Open.

“I was pushing pretty hard for that, so to get it is pretty nice. I get to play both my home Opens now.”

After missing the cut by five shots at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship in mid January, Thomas sat out the middle leg of the Desert Swing in Qatar. The time on the sidelines, coupled with his Majlis magic. has him amped for Indian.

“It just makes you want to be out there so bad,” said Thomas who sprung to prominence by becoming the first amateur winner of a MENA Tour event, the Dubai Creek Open in September.

“The Desert Classic really got the juices going so I just want to get out there and play as much as I can on the big stage. I just cannot wait.”

Beyond the Indian Open, Thomas is eyeing the MENA Tour’s second Moroccan stop of 2017, the Royal Golf Mohammedia Open in Casablanca and the developmental tour’s Thailand swing either side of an invite to the prestigious Sage Valley Junior Invitational in the U.S. in April.

Beyond that he will have a tilt at the British and U.S. Amateur Championships, the U.S. Junior Championship and is currently leading the International team standings for September’s Junior Presidents Cup to be held at Liberty National in New Jersey two days before the senior contest.

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