Bank on the Barclays to take you to the end

GOLF:THE END is nigh. The end of our 2011 Fantasy Golf competition that is, nothing more dramatic than that. We have just four tournaments to go before we hand out the prizes, starting with this week's Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles and the Barclays in New Jersey.

After the near wipe-out that was week 20, with so few of our players in action, week 21 looks considerably more hopeful. Unless, of course, Hurricane Irene intervenes in New Jersey and sends everyone diving for cover. Mind you, the Plainfield Country Club survived a 15 second rattling from Tuesday’s earthquake, so we’ll just trust that it can see off Irene too.

Some of your more favoured players, among them Rory McIlroy, Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer and Miguel Angel Jimenez, will be taking this week off, but 58 of the 76 names on our list (compared to last week’s 23) are scheduled to play in one of the two tournaments, 35 of them at the Barclays.

Group four has the slimmest pickings, with only Ross Fisher and Chris Wood due to play, but if you were dipping in to the transfer market you had plenty of options in the other groups – every player in groups five and seven, for example, is in the field for either the Johnnie Walker or the Barclays, with just one missing from groups two, three, six and ten.

The Barclays features the top 125 players in the FedEx standings (non-PGA Tour members, such as McIlroy and Westwood, are ineligible), with Pádraig Harrington squeezing in in 124th position after his top 50 finish at the Wyndham. That should have cheered the 24 per cent of managers who have him from group six.

Only the top 100 at the Barclays, though, will make it through to the next event in the series, the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston, the final American tournament in our schedule – our other tournament next week is the European Masters.

Our contenders, then, will be rather keen on their Barclays challengers making it in to that top 100, not just so they’ll pick up some useful points in week 21, but also so they’ll have a reasonable enough contingent flying the team flag at the Deutsche Bank.