Well folks, another week out of the way and if this was a horse race you'd have to say that there was quite a bunch gathering just behind the leader as we turn into the home straight of our Golf Masters tour. Edward Staunton and his Woosnam's Wonders is still leading the way after week 24 but the aptly named Chislers have chipped another £22,567 off his lead which, going into this weekend's double scoring PGA Championship, now stands at just £58,908. That, to put it in perspective, is just about what the player who finishes 13th at Winged Foot in New York will earn for his manager.
For Staunton, that's far too close for comfort but then he will not be much surprised after his seven-man team had another quiet week, turning in just £41,500, around a third of the figure he had averaged for the previous 23 weeks and £14,000 less than the average for this one.
Once again it was his loyal servants Jim Furyk and Darren Clarke who picked up the bulk of the southerner's tally, although the benefit of Furyk's efforts are somewhat reduced in the context of the immediate leadership battle by the fact that he is also in Kieran O'Toole's second-placed team.
O'Toole, meanwhile, owes his latest gain on the leader to the efforts of Lee Westwood at the Czech Open where the Englishman produced a four-round total of 271 to pick up a share of seventh place which was worth £38,400 to his boss back in Ireland.
Behind him, with so many of the leading names resting up ahead of this weekend's big US event, there is virtually no change among the rest of the top 10 with only a minor reshuffling of the places going on. In at 15 from nowhere, however, is John Sheehan's DJ Hearts.
Another team which boasts the talents of Furyk, the Hearts also includes the highly productive Ernie Els as well as bargain buy Ignacio Garrido and Scott McCarron. Of these, the former two had another highly profitable week (£60,000 and £75,000 respectively) and while McCarron rested up Niclas Fasth and Bob Tway chipped in more than £90,000 between them to give Sheehan fourth place this week and a considerably brighter outlook in the overall competition.
Without a tournament winner, of course, it's difficult to put together a score capable of lifting one of our fourballs and not even DJ Hearts' fine team effort could match the winnings of Michael Coughlin's Major Tom.
Every one of the team scored and although the contributions of Fred Funk and Duffy Waldorf were modest, Vijay Singh, Russ Cochrane and Fasth provided the backbone of a £279,550 score for the week. Singh, incidentally, was chosen by more than three times as many managers as this week's other tournament winner, Bernhard Langer. The Buick Open winner figures in most of this week's leading teams but apart from earning Coughlin, who comes from Ardsallagh Avenue in Navan, a trip to Kilkenny, his efforts and those of his team-mates have done little to make an impact on the main title race.
Major Tom's score for this week brings the team's total to date up to £1,951,213 which is around £313,000 better than the average but still only good enough for 3,028th place in the table which may be just a little too far back to mount a serious challenge over the closing six week's of our competition.
Those six weeks, meanwhile, tee off today in New York where all of the big names will be in the hunt for one of the richest prizes on the tour, after which the European Open and World Series will also provide plenty of potential for a shake up. They are, in other words, moving into the final furlong and it's still wide open.
