Elliot Saltman back to square one as he gears up for Q-School

THREE holes-in-one, two of them in the same tournament, couldn’t help Elliot Saltman hang on to his European Tour card, but the big Archerfield Links man is confident he can end an eventful 2011 on a high at the Qualifying School, which seems to get later every year.

Eighteen Scots set out tomorrow at the four courses in southern Spain hosting the second stage, including Saltman, who passed the same test a year ago before going on to secure a card along with his younger brother, Lloyd, by finishing 28th in the final.

Around the same time as that success, Saltman was told he’d be facing a Tour disciplinary hearing over a “serious breach” of regulations at a Challenge Tour event in Russia and he was subsequently handed a three-month ban in January.

The 29-year-old said the likes of Colin Montgomerie and Darren Clarke had helped him “settle” back on the Tour once that ban was over and, despite being disappointed to be 201st on the money-list after an encouraging start to his campaign, Saltman now has his sights set on securing a place back at the top table next season.

“This time last year things were obviously building [regarding the allegation by two playing partners that he had wrongly marked his ball] so things are a bit clearer in my mind this time,” he said. “It was at the final stage where I was told that I had to go to Abu Dhabi for the meeting with the committee. After the ban, it was more of a mental thing for me to deal with; how I would be perceived by everybody else. But a lot of players welcomed me back. Monty came up and spoke to me, Darren Clarke and some of the other top boys came to me, too, and wished me all the best. They told me to ‘go out and do your job’. That helped me settle.

“Coming back was fine, but, over the season, I simply didn’t score well enough and it was disappointing the number of cuts I missed.”

Saltman had earned around £45,000 in early June, but then made only four cuts in 16 events to finish well short of the £220,000 he would have needed to finish in the top 115 on the money-list.

It means he now has to come through a four-round test at Las Colinas, near Alicante, then try to emulate his achievement in the six-round final stage, which starts at PGA Catalunya in Girona on Saturday week.

“It’s back to square one,” he added. “This is where I started last year and I got all the way through so I just have to try and do that all over again.

“This year has not been as I expected, but sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board, start again and try and make improvements. I know what the Q-School is all about and I’m feeling quite confident that I’ll do the job.”

You could say Saltman was both lucky and unlucky with his hat-trick of holes-in-one this year. Neither the brace in the Wales Open nor the one in the Madrid Masters earned him a car. In Spain, he won his own weight in ham. “There was a watch and Volvo on the other holes and I got ham,” joked Saltman. “It’s beautiful stuff, but they gave me 20 kilos and when you’ve had a packet and you’re staring at another few packets all day long you can get a bit sick of it. In Wales, there was a car as well, but that was on the other hole, too. But I got a couple of nights down in the presidential suite with my fiancée, so that was a nice bonus.”

Joining Saltman at Las Colinas are Chris Kelly, Mark Kerr, Shaun McAllister and Kris Nicol, while the second-stage hopefuls at Costa Ballena include Jack Doherty, Graham Fox, Scott Henry, Andrew McArthur, Paul McKechnie, Philip McLean, Jamie McLeary and Raymond Russell.

El Valle, where Callum Macaulay, Alan McLean and James White are in the field, and La Manga, where the field includes Gavin Dear and Neil Fenwick, are the other venues being used to whittle down the hopefuls for the final test.