George Murray on quest to win back top table place

GEORGE Murray has shaken things up in a bid to kick-start his career after the Fifer went from challenging for one of the European Tour’s top titles to “digging up” a course through bad golf in the space of a few months.

One of the highlights of the 2011 season was seeing Murray, who’d struggled in his European Tour rookie campaign until that point, securing his card in style in his own backyard as the Anstruther man finished joint-third in the Dunhill Links Championship.

Boosted by that performance – he played with Luke Donald in the final round and outscored the world No 1 at the time by three shots over the Old Course – Murray then finished second in the Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek in South Africa just over a month later.

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Helped by combined earnings of just under £270,000, the former Scottish Amateur champion finished 81st in the Race to Dubai but, after slipping to 155th 12 months later, he found himself back at the Qualifying School in Spain at the end of last year. There, Murray was in a card-winning position until an agonising double-bogey 6 at the final hole, missing a short putt, in the six-round marathon in Girona saw him miss out on an instant return to main Tour. That left him having to concentrate mainly on the Challenge Tour this year, although he has managed to secure a spot in this week’s Hassan Trophy in Morocco.

“Finishing third and second at the end of 2011 was really my chance to kick on and I didn’t,” admitted Murray, who has been boosted in his bid to secure a place back at the top table in European golf by being among seven players receiving financial support through Team Scottish Hydro this year.

“It went from bad to worse. When you’re playing well, golf seems quite easy and it just happens. But, when you get in a rut, your thoughts change and you’re playing just to make the cut. When you do that, you’re beat before you even start.

“I went to South Africa after I’d missed that putt at the Q-School and was still thinking about it. I knew I wasn’t going to do well as a consequence of that. After a while I said to myself, ‘get over it because hopefully you’ll get the chance to miss more important putts like that in your career’, so I shunted that to the back of my mind.”

Murray may be one of the game’s more laid-back characters but missing eight consecutive cuts in the middle of last season – a run that included the Scottish Open, Johnnie Walker Championship and the Dunhill Links – made him realise that changes were required.

“I’m working with Jim Farmer now,” said the 29-year-old. “Ian Rae has been my coach since I was 15 or 16. His knowledge of the swing is second to none but he was away quite a lot with the SGU and I was playing poorly. In Holland last year, I was digging up the course and playing terribly and I phoned Ian and he was away somewhere. I knew then I needed to try something else.

“In addition to making a few swing changes, I’ve worked a bit on my fitness while I’m also working with a psychologist. I’m just investing in myself a bit more. I’ve lost 11 pounds of fat. I mucked about at the gym but then I started working with someone to take it a bit more seriously.”

Murray started his 2013 Challenge Tour campaign by finishing 11th in India and has since followed that up with a third place in Kenya. The second-tier circuit starts up in earnest in Madrid at the end of next month and pretty much runs unbroken from then through to the end of October.

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“Being back on Challenge Tour is a bit of a culture shock,” he admits. “You can moan about it but, at the end of the day, we’re all there for the same reason and you have to get your head down and do what you need to do to get back on the Tour.

“You need a top ten on the Challenge Tour and, if you get that category, you have to play average to lose your card, to be fair, because you do get a lot of chances with that category.”