It was a dream come true for the statisticians and a match of countless delights for the audience. But most of all it was an absolute joy for Ian Woosnam, one of the best days of his professional life. His very inclusion in
the Cisco World Match Play Championship had been criticised in some quarters, but he proved the doubters wrong with a magnificent performance that took him
to victory over Padraig Harrington in a pulsating final.
That Woosnam won fair and square was beyond doubt, but it was difficult not to feel a grain of sympathy for his opponent. Harrington was on the verge of tears and almost incapable of speech after Woosnam had completed a 2 and 1 victory. He knew he had had the match in the palm of his hands deep into the front nine in the afternoon and had let it let it slip through his fingers
like a wriggling trout.
The decisive moment, as far as Harrington was concerned, came when he called a penalty shot on himself from the woods on the ninth in the afternoon
after seeing the ball move a fraction of an inch as he addressed it. In the end he had to concede the hole after incurring another penalty behind the green. He refused to admit that the incident upset him, but it is undeniably
true that from that moment the tide turned in Woosnam's favour.
It flowed ever more strongly behind the Welshman as the match moved into the last nine holes. He won the 11th with a 16-foot putt for birdie, took the 12th with another birdie and won his third hole on the trot on the 13th. He
took 13 strokes to play thorse four holes compared with Harrington's 17. It was all going sadly wrong for the Dubliner and, more importantly, he seemed incapable of doing anything about it.
In truth, the afternoon's play did not measure up to the fireworks that had been produced by both men before lunch. That was nothing to be ashamed of, however - the morning of Sunday, October 14 will be forever seared in the memory of anybody who was lucky enough to see it.
Woosnam had a spell of seven birdies from the second hole of the match to equal his own tournament record and his front nine of 28 set another one. Harrington's 61 in the morning smashed another World Match Play best mark and his 30 home was also a new low.
It does not end there. At 43, Woosnam becomes the oldest player to win the event, two years older than Mark O'Meara was when he defeated Tiger Woods in the 1998 final, he is the first unseeded player to win since Bill Rogers in 1979 and the first to win in three decades (1987 and 1990 were his first two victories).
And finally, just to round it all off neatly, it was his first victory anywhere since 1997, when he won the Volvo PGA Championship at - wouldn't you just know it? - Wentworth. For once, the bald stats, facts and figures do not lie. But, in the case of this classic, neither do they tell the whole truth, either.
