Golf Masters: Don't say you weren't warned.

Just two weeks ago, in the guise of a Peter Alliss commentary, we suggested that any manager wishing to climb the leaderboard would be well advised to recruit Vijay Singh.

There were several reasons for this.

For a start most managers were raving about Tiger Woods after his win in the British Open so if you wanted to gain ground on the leaders, you had to do something different. Of course, there's no point in doing something different if it's going to leave you even further behind. It's a bit like the dilemma that faces those who take the contrarian approach to buying out of favour shares. Maybe they are out of favour because the company stinks or maybe they are underpriced and about to soar to new heights.

In the case of Singh, we took the optimistic view. His ball striking at the Open was top notch and it was only putting that let him down. With a new wand in the bag we fancied his chances at the Buick.

It's also the tournament which he won last year to initiate the sizzling stretch in which he captured four further titles in the next eight weeks and supplanted Woods at the top of the world rankings. Among those titles was the PGA where we offer double money and Singh defends next week.

Sure enough Singh pitched up at Warwick Hills and led the field in putts per green in regulation. He offset a lone three-putt with 34 singles over the four days. Not even Woods' career-low 61 on Friday could phase Vijay who shut the door firmly in the Tiger's face with five birdies in the first six holes on Saturday.

Before we get too carried away we have to admit that Woods' late surge on Sunday when he covered nine holes in eight under diluted the advantage that employing Singh gave our managers. They earned just a25,000 extra this week. However, those who transferred in Tiger will know that they could have done better and they include our overall leader Tony Murnaghan. He used the last available switches in his Markers Conditions line-up to replace Darren Clarke and Angel Cabrera with Woods and Arjun Atwal.

Paul Dowling has very belatedly come forward as the manager of Team 30123 who are now known as Stone Roses and are up to second place. The Roses employ neither Woods nor Singh but gained ground with the inspired recruitment of the Scandinavian Masters winner, Mark Hensby, in place of Michael Campbell.

Ian McGonigle did recruit Woods for his Harry's Seven team and although they dropped to third on the leaderboard, they moved closer to the top in monetary terms. Just a15,963 now separates the leading three.

Dowling has four transfers left and McGonigle has two and some other useful information for the chasing pack is that 10 of the top 50 now employ Woods, six have Singh while Ernie Els, Retief Goosen and Phil Mickelson do not appear in any of our top-50 teams.

Goosen and Mickelson are in action at the International this week and the Diageo Championship is our other counting event.