The 138th Open, Turnberry
Date: 16-19 July
Coverage: Live TV coverage on BBC Two, Online and the Red Button, live on Radio 5 Live and text commentary online on all four days
Watch Tiger Woods' second round By Rob Hodgetts and Mark Orlovac
BBC Sport at Turnberry |
 Tiger Woods's missed cut in the Open shocked everyone at Turnberry.  | 606: DEBATE |
The world number one, chasing his 15th major title, was the overwhelming favourite after winning three times in his eight events since returning from knee surgery. But he looked out-of-sorts from day one and skulked home early after missing only his second cut in 48 majors. We caught up with BBC Sport's golf experts to hear their views on Woods. "It's very difficult to criticise Tiger. He's just had a bad week. It's like Don Bradman coming into his final innings and he's out for nought. He didn't play very well but it's only about the fifth bad week he's had in 13 years. He will regroup and come back and probably win another couple before the end of the year. "I think his problems are quite small, but he's won all these things without any help from me. When he tries to hit it too hard he goes up and down. He just does elementary things, I think. "If he just stood up and swung he would be OK. He came, he saw, Tiger Tiger was not burning too bright. That's the end of it." "He's obviously been practising his down-the-shaft driver, trying to get a little slidey cutty one from left to right. But on a few tee shots the ball started left and went further left. "Coming into the second round I thought he would either come up with something, or the breeze would accentuate the problems, and it was the latter. "His tee shots off the 9th and 10th were scary bad ones - he pushed those right as he was frightened of pulling them. "To say there is something fundamentally wrong with Tiger would be ridiculous - he has won three times this year - but to see him not make the cut was a huge shock. "Although he says it is, I don't think his swing is quite as good as it was in 1999 and 2000. "He's trying to get fast from the top, and there's also a lot more head movement. With his old swing he would swing around the hub of the wheel, around his neck, and nothing much moved. It was a very uncomplicated action. Now, as he comes into the ball his head goes down and as he's hitting it he straightens up and it goes up. "Hank Haney, his coach, was a big Ben Hogan fan and it appears they are trying to move his swing to a slightly more Ben Hogan style of playing. "You can't play well every week and this was a blip but he's not far awry. Lady luck was also against him. But if your game is not right, with tricky conditions and a little bit more tension, golf can find you out. "But you still thought on 18 he would chip in and make the weekend. That's the miracle man he is." "He played extremely poorly and the stats do not lie. He was 98th in greens-in-regulation for the first two rounds out of the 156-man field and that's not good enough. "He was just about managing to hang on to most of his iron shots but on the longer stuff he wasn't swinging well enough to hit the shots that a golf course of this difficulty demands. "It's a surprise. Even when he's playing badly we've come to expect him to finish top 10. "He will be thinking all the way back home about his swing and what he needs to do next. He will be wondering whether to continue working on what he has been working on, or whether to ask advice from somewhere else. "It's difficult when you are used to working with one coach like he is with Hank, but I think maybe they have got to take a slightly different direction because he is so good at preparing himself for majors that when he looks back and thinks of how he played this week, it will hurt him. "In my opinion there is too much movement of the head. It goes down a lot at the start of the downswing, and up at impact, which is too soon. "He is swinging a little flattish with the longer clubs and in his heyday he was much steeper with the club on the way back which I preferred; I felt the club face was square for a longer period during the swing. "He is trying to get rid of the leg snap to ease pressure on his left knee, but it's a question of how to fit that in to the rest of the swing. The way he was swinging this week it wasn't really taking pressure off the left knee, if anything it was putting pressure on it because he was jumping at the ball to try and square the club face up. "Using a lot of irons off the tee would have been perfect for him but when the wind gets up on a course like this you simply have to get the bigger stuff out and that is what found him out eventually." "He's been struggling for a while with his swing, even back at the Masters, and it's a testament to how brilliant the guy is that he finished sixth. He won at Memorial after keeping the ball on the fairway off the tee, which has been his problem, came sixth at the US Open and won his tournament at Congressional. "So somewhere in there he's played some great golf, but under the pressure of the Open and the tougher weather he got shown up. There's definitely something in there he needs to work on. The ball is not taking off on the right line. He and Hank need to get together and work it out. "He'll come back with a vengeance, but it's not the Tiger of 2000 when his swing was incredible and he never looked like hitting a poor shot. Now he looks vulnerable, especially when the weather's bad. "The swing is very different - it's on a different plane, the position at the top of the backswing is different. He's so strong that when he goes at it about 70%-80% he can get away with everything. But when he tries to go at it hard it just comes apart a bit. "No-one thinks his way around the course better than Tiger so it's nothing about his game plan. The ball's just not going where he's looking."
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