Tommy Fleetwood finds groove in Dubai and opens up on 2021's driving problems

Never mind “driving for show”, Tommy Fleetwood happens to be driving to stay among the world’s elite. During his descent down the rankings in 2021, there were, he reveals, times when he was on tee-boxes and “always on the edge of losing my ball somewhere”.

Fortunately for his many admirers, the Englishman is starting to feel in control again.

His first-round 67 here in the opening round of the Slync.io Dubai Desert Classic was a model in hitting the fairway and making the hay from the cut stuff. This wonderful iron player admits, however, that these are small steps, as he seeks to reclimb the mountain.

“I'm sacrificing a bit of speed and distance just to have a shot that's going to put me in play more often than not,” he said. “As soon as I can start doing that, get the percentage up in hitting the fairway or even if the first cut, I can start scoring and go from there. At the moment, it's just that one shot that's going to put you in play - and keep you in it.”

Fleetwood has never been anything less than humble, but it is a mark of this maddening game that his ambitions, in a playing sense anyway, must for the moment be so prosaic and so pragmatic. Perfection can go out of the window for the time being as he tries to stop the rot.

At world No 43 he is lower in the rankings than he has been in five years and with only one strokeplay top-five in the last 20 months, he  has lost his playing privileges on the PGA Tour, an almost inconceivable scenario when he was the top-ranked Englishman at world No 9 in 2018, the year he set a record for a Ryder Cup rookie when winning his first four matches at Le Golf National.

Now, he has four other compatriots above him and the memory of the Ryder Cup shellacking four months ago, when