European Tour Fantasy Golf Predictions – Made in Denmark

2018 Made in Denmark Preview

We’re getting to that time of the golf season where the players have their eyes on the big prize.

For some, it will be chance to line up for Team Europe in the Ryder Cup in about a month’s time, and this week’s event – the Made in Denmark – is the last tournament at which qualification points can be earned.

For others, the desire to accumulate more Race to Dubai points is evident; there are huge cash bonuses on offer for strong showings in the final playoff series.

For those further down the pecking order, cashing some decent cheques in the next few weeks will help stave off the spectre of losing their tour card and having to through the dreaded Q School system.

By the end of Sunday, we will know the eight automatic picks for Thomas Bjorn’s Ryder Cup team, with Thorbjorn Olesen, Thomas Pieters, Matt Fitzpatrick and Eddie Pepperell all looking for a win this week that would secure their spot on the team.

Eddie Pepperell of England plays his tee shot on the fourth hole…

Eddie Pepperell of England plays his tee shot on the fourth hole during the final round of the 100th PGA Championship at the Bellerive Country Club on August 12, 2018 in St Louis, Missouri. Get premium, high resolution news photos at Getty Images

And with four wildcard picks available, guys like Matt Wallace will be hoping to impress the Dane on his home turf.

One player who won’t be on the Ryder Cup roster, but who has booked his place in the Race to Dubai finals, is Andrea Pavan, the talented Italian who took the honors in last week’s Czech Masters.

He saw off a valiant fight from Padraig Harrington, the old-timer who delivered some intriguing tee-to-green stats at the PGA Championships a couple of weeks ago and who is clearly back in the groove.

Harrington won’t be in Scandinavia, Pavan will, for this week’s Made in Denmark, which after four good years at the Himmerland club makes a frustrating move to Silkeborg RY Golf Club in Aarhus.

It’s frustrating because we know very little about it, and as ever the European Tour website is almost completely unhelpful. It’s a tree-lined Par 72 playing 6,975 yards – that’s all the info we have published – and a Google Image search confirms some quite significant doglegging holes played around dense woodland.

But other holes appear quite open, with a number of bunkers and water hazards. Fairways are undulating and some tee boxes are played from elevated positions.

There are four Par 5s that all play around the 550 yard mark, and so that sets the eagle-opportunity radar buzzing. But given the nature of the thick trees and the sharp turns left and right, it may be the case that bombers don’t have things all their own way.

We say “may”….quite, simply there is a lot of guesswork that will go into selecting our roster this week, and indeed it may be worth simply opting for players who are in-form and who have something to play for in Denmark.

So who makes our draft for the 2018 Made in Denmark?

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This Week’s Made in Denmark Fantasy Picks & Predictions

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This Week’s Made in Denmark Fantasy Picks

Eddie Pepperell – $10,400 – Thorbjorn Olesen and Thomas Pieters are the chalk picks this week; Olesen, on home soil, will be looking to build on a run of a win and four top-10s in his last nine starts, while Pieters has both form and the Ryder Cup sweats on his side.

But if Silkeborg Ry plays as technical as it looks, both of those noted hot-heads might be ones to swerve this week. And with Matt Fitzpatrick not quite at the top of his game, the smart play might just be Eddie Pepperell.

We saw last week in the US how the pressure of Ryder Cup qualification can be a positive thing with Bryson DeChambeau claiming The Northern Trust, and perhaps a similar theme will play out this week for the rather more easy-going Pepperell.

The Englishman has recorded top-10 finishes in three of his last four starts, including a T2 effort at the Scottish Open, T6 at the British Open and T9 at last week’s Czech Masters.

Pepperell is more than willing to hit irons off the tee, and given the nature of Silkeborg Ry – or how we imagine it might play – that will give him an edge over the all-out attack mode of Olesen and Pieters.

Erik van Rooyen – $8,900 – A fantastic season on the European Tour has led many to wondering just how far this talented South African can go in the game.

That’s a question we don’t have the answer to right now, but some hugely encouraging showings on the continent have certainly caught the eye.

Is Van Rooyen simply a hometown bully? That was a fair hypothesis given his trio of top-10s on home soil at the start of the campaign, but he has since followed up with top-20s at Wentworth in the BMW PGA Championship and at Carnoustie for the British Open, with T4 at the Irish Open sandwiched in-between.

He ranks 21st on Tour for Stroke Average and 4th for Greens in Regulation, and with little else to go on we note those stats mark Van Rooyen out as a class act possibly on the brink of greater things.

Thomas Aiken – $7,800 – When flicking through the screenshots of Silkeborg RY, we were taken aback by how South African it looked.

Think Glendower and Pretoria CC, with their dense tree lines and narrow-ish fairways, and you’ll get what we mean.

One player who has thrived at both is Thomas Aiken, and happily he has shown form at another tree-lined Scandinavian test lately at the Nordea Masters.

Indeed, with the 54-hole lead in Sweden he may have fancied adding to his haul of three European Tour titles.

It wasn’t to be – he finished solo second, but even so it was a handy marker for a player comfortable picking his way around layouts that feel familiar to him.

David Horsey – $7,400 – He won this event in 2015 and was runner-up in 2017, which highlights David Horsey’s comfortability when playing golf in Denmark.

Of course, we have a new layout to contend with now, but the Englishman is playing well enough to suggest a return to a happy hunting ground will get the juices flowing.

Aside from the Links swing, in his last three starts Horsey has a best of T7 at the Shot Clock Masters and has finished no lower than T40, and you wonder how inspirational the victory of another English journeyman at the Nordea Masters – Paul Waring – will prove to be.

Adam Bland – $6,800 – This is one of those ‘huh?’ based picks where you can’t quite believe the price.

Bland has recorded back-to-back top-20s in Sweden and the Czech Republic, and yet he is down among the also-rans in the sub $7,000 group.

This is not scientifically proven, but we like to think that left-handers have an advantage on tree-lined, doglegging courses. It must be something to do with their natural ability to hit the ball from left-to-right, but when you look at the records of the likes of Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Mike Weir and Steve Flesch at Augusta National you kinda get the idea.

Perhaps Bland is well suited to the Silkeborg Ry test, and whose to say another top 20 – or higher – won’t be in the offing.

Jinho Choi – $6,400 – In his debut season as a European Tour pro, the Korean has made 15 cuts from 22 starts.

Those are excellent numbers for a $6,400 pick, and they are based upon the repeatability of a stunning season-long GIR rate of 69.81% – captured over 72 completed rounds!

That confirms that Choi is one to watch next season as he continues to learn his craft on the continent.

Another decent return is that 12 of his last 20 rounds have been played at level par or better; not bad, considering that run includes trips to fiddly Links courses, the huge Green Eagle for the European Open and the tree-lined Scandinavian fare for the Nordea Masters.

Choi won’t win Made in Denmark, but he will surely far outweigh his lowly salary-based expectations.

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