BMW PGA Championship: Five Contenders For The Title
By Matt Coles
The European Tour’s flagship event, the BMW PGA Championship, takes place at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, with a flurry of big names looking for glory.
This is the biggest event on the European Tour’s calendar, bar the four majors and the World Golf Championships events, with more points on offer in the Race to Dubai standings than the rest of the tour’s tournaments, including the other Rolex Series events. In other words… the BMW PGA Championship is important.
It is a big one, and being held in England, several English golfers want to secure victory this week. They include the likes of Justin Rose, Matthew Fitzpatrick, and Paul Casey. The latter has won this event in the past, a decade ago, while the former is the 2013 US Open Champion and a 2016 Olympic Gold Medal winner.
The pair, along with Fitzpatrick, a five-time European Tour victor, including the 2016 DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, will be looking to have a good week.
The European trio of Alex Noren, Jon Rahm, and Bernd Wiesberger will also be looking for success. The Swede won this title a couple of years ago, while the other two have both already claimed a Rolex Series title in 2019.
Rahm was the winner of the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open at Lahinch, while the Austrian took home the Aberdeen Standard Investments Scottish Open title in the summer.
It is not just Europeans on the course this week, with a host of Americans out there as well, taking a break from PGA TOUR action for the BMW PGA Championship.
Former Masters Champion Patrick Reed, 2014 FedEx Cup Champion Billy Horschel and Tony Finau, a constant top-ten finisher in majors, will all take part at Wentworth. Add South Africa’s Erik van Rooyen, who claimed his first European Tour title at the Scandinavian Invitation last month, and the Europeans will not have it all their way.
However, we have put a list of our top five contenders together, and they are all European… Awkward!