We received a letter this week from our old Golf Masters' friend Tom Murray, of Raheny in Dublin, in which he hurled abuse at his Cuckoos and Cranes line-ups for failing him miserably in this year's competition. ("They must be roosting on a branch very near the bottom of the pile . . . one thing is for sure, they can take flight to North Africa when I'm picking my teams next year," said our disgruntled manager).

The one advantage, however, in having entirely useless teams like Tom's, that occupy the nether regions of our "leaderboard", is that you are spared an excruciatingly tense conclusion to the competition.

Take Paul Sheehan's predicament, for example. If he is to win our £10,000 first prize next week, he needs Peter Baker, Costantino Rocca and Bob Estes to win £16,574 more than Katsuyoshi Tomori, Sam Torrance and Mathias Gronberg. All of which means that every drive, chip and putt between Thursday morning and Sunday night, in Cologne and San Antonio, will be, very nearly, a matter of life and death for our Dublin manager.

And then you have Galway's Robbie Canning, who needs Scott Hoch and Jean Van de Velde to produce their best performances of the season . . . while hoping that Tomori, Torrance, Gronberg, Baker, Rocca, Estes and Howell (all in teams above him) spend much of Thursday and Friday stuck in bunkers. Meanwhile, Brian Fitzpatrick will pray that all the above-mentioned play like 28-handicappers (and are disqualified, withdraw or miss the cut), while Thomas Bjorn, Thomas Gogele and Stewart Cink win enough for the Niblicks to bridge (and overtake) the £155,813 gap between him and the Winners (and the three other teams between him and top spot).

But, barring a golfing miracle or two, it looks like a straight fight between Susan Coleman and Paul Sheehan's Paul 8 for this year's first prize, with the rest battling it out for second (£1,000) and third (£500) places. Tom Murray, meanwhile, can sit back, stress-free, observing the battle, while his Cuckoos and Cranes prepare for migration.