THE RANGE...WHERE CARELESS TALK COSTS SHOTS

Keep calm and remember your fundamentals

- KARL MORRIS

As a performance coach, I am fascinated by improvement in any field of sporting activity... and this year, we got one in the world of football. You don't need me to tell you about the England team's reputation and record when it comes to penalty shoot-outs - and yet in the quarter-finals of this summer's European Championships, we witnessed an incredible thing: five spot- kicks dispatched with an assurance that bordered on eerie.

In the aftermath, a story emerged - of how the team and its coaches had abandoned the idea that shoot-outs were a matter of luck, a lottery, and looked into ways of stacking the odds in their favour. How well it worked. And how well it could work for you too, on the golf course. Let me explain.

When it comes to putting, we golfers are treading a remarkably fine line. On the one hand, we understand how important it is to our score, but on the other, we seem to have a huge problem giving this part of the game its due respect. For so many club players, a great putting performance is 'streaky', a question of luck. As a consequence, this part of the game gets undervalued, neglected, and performance suffers. Contrast this to the attitude we take to ballstriking, a fine and noble thing involving great feats of skill and strength. There's nothing fluky about a pure, 200-yard 4-iron, is there?