Cullen displays old fire

You don't expect so much civility on the Sunday of a South of Ireland championship. The norm, or so tradition would have us believe, is for shocks of seismic proportions to occur when qualifiers first meet seeded players with the links treating those who drop their concentration for even a moment with disdain and liable to inflict severe punishment.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that this is the 100th staging of this august event, sponsored by Irish Shell, but shocks were few and far between at Lahinch yesterday.

Indeed, the most shell- shocked people around were those Limerick hurling supporters who deserted the course for a while to view their team on television in the clubhouse only to later wish that they'd stayed out in the sun that finally broke through grey skies.

In a golfing context, however, there were no real upsets. Five of Ireland's six-man European championship finalists were in action, and all won - comfortably!

So the closest thing to any sort of surprise was probably Patrick Collier's one-hole victory over Athlone's Colm Moriarty. Yet, given that Collier won this championship four years ago, as well as the fact that he represents the host club and knows the nuances of the course better than most, even that win failed to raise many eyebrows.

Tim Rice, Noel Fox, Graeme McDowell, Michael McDermott, and Stephen Browne were the five members of that European runners-up team to make short work of their opponents, while Irish close champion Gavin McNeill again showed his current well-being by taking hold of his match with Greg Young early on and finishing matters on the 13th green.

There was a time that Gary Cullen would have been one of the first names pencilled onto the sheet for any Irish team, but he has endured a miserable couple of years ever since injuring his back in the St Andrews Links Trophy in 1999. It has been a long haul back, yet the Beaverstown player - who has sought salvation for his putting problems by switching to the broom-handle putter - showed yesterday that he still has the stomach for a good old scrap.

In a quite extraordinary match with Castle's Jim Mulready, in which only five of 18 holes were halved, Cullen eventually forged out a one hole win. Having lost the second to an eagle, he won the third and fifth, only to lose three holes in succession from the sixth. In fact, Cullen had to hole an 18 footer to share the ninth and turn just two down.

That deficit didn't last long, and that long putt on the ninth provided the impetus for a charge. A string of four holes where Cullen punished some loose play from his opponent meant that he turned that two-hole deficit into a two-hole lead, only for the game of yo-yo to continue with Mulready winning the 14th and 15th to square things.

The crucial hole proved to be the 16th where Cullen managed to get up and down after putting his tee-shot over the back of the green, while Mulready - from a similar spot - didn't. And, after the pair shared the 17th, the first hole on the homeward run that wasn't won outright, a six footer for birdie to half the 18th, was enough to send Cullen on to a third round meeting with Corrstown's Paul Carey.