EUROPEAN TOUR QUALIFYING SCHOOL: WHEN YOU shoot a four over 76 on a day when 45 players in the 70-man field match or break par, you can expect to slide down the leaderboard.

But given his erratic performance, Royal Dublin’s Niall Kearney had no complaints as his hopes of finishing inside the top 30 and ties who will earn tour cards this evening slipped away at PGA Golf de Catalunya.

“I have just played sloppy golf the last few days,” Kearney said after a round on the Stadium Course that featured three birdies, three bogeys and two costly double bogeys. “The swing has been a little bit off and I haven’t really had the bounce of the ball and been stuck behind a few trees with no swing . . . But I’ll have a full Challenge Tour card next year, which is what I had this year before I had the operation.”

Nine strokes behind the top 30 and ties who will earn cards today, he added: “I’ll just go out tomorrow and give it a rip and see what happens.”

Kearney had surgery to stabilise his left shoulder in May and missed six months of the Challenge Tour season. He went into yesterday’s fifth round on four-under par, three shots outside the top 30. But he was on the back foot after he failed to get up and down from sand at the par-three 11th and then made a double bogey six at the 14th, where he drove behind a tree, chipped out sideways and failed to get up and down again after bunkering his third.

While he birdied the easy par-five 15th and at the first, his hopes suffered a fatal blow when he three-putted the fourth for a bogey and then found water left of the green at the par-three fifth and double bogeyed. He came within an inch of making an eagle two at the 410-yard sixth, where his nine-iron approach burned the edge as it spun back past the hole. But he bogeyed the ninth to finish the day tied for 69th.

England’s Simon Wakefield shot a 67 and Spain’s Carlos del Moral a seven-under 65 to lead by a shot on 16 under with 35 players at nine-under or better in the continuing battle for tour cards.