Robert Lee calls for tougher penalties for slow play offenders

Robert Lee looks back on the big talking points from The Players Championship and calls for tougher penalties for slow play while paying tribute to a "Tiger-like" run of form from Jason Day.

The biggest stories to come out of last week's Players Championship revolved around yet another big win for the red-hot Jason Day, while slow play and a ridiculous course set-up on day three were the negatives.

Yes, conditions were brutally tough in the third round, but taking over five and a half hours for a round of golf is not good enough.

There are allowances, things happen and you fall behind. The pace of play was really bad at TPC Sawgrass, but the PGA Tour rarely enforces penalties for slow play, whether it's a fine or a shot penalty.

So if nothing is getting done about it, why wouldn't you take your time! Many of the players won't be bothered about the pace of play, and I've heard players say they will not speed up for anyone. They have their routines, and they will stick to them.

The European Tour has introduced 'monitoring penalties' this year, and this new regulation hit the headlines back in January when Jordan Spieth received a warning in Abu Dhabi. But the PGA Tour hasn't followed suit and five hours is now considered the norm for a competitive round.

It could be an education thing. Even the young kids hitting the Tour now are slow, so they must have been slow playing college golf as well. Everyone develops a speed of play that suits them, and they're not going to change it unless there's a chance of losing a shot or two.

A colleague of mine played recently with three young internationals in among the other fourballs of the day, and were warned by the ranger that they were holding the course up - and my buddy is quick!

The PGA Tour keeps a lot of stuff in house, so it's possible players are being fined without us knowing. But a majority of the players earn enough to not be concerned about being fined. Only the introduction of shot penalties will have the desired effect at pro level.

And while we're at it, ban the players from using green books. They can refer to them during practice, but not during a tournament. And put an end to caddies lining up shots for the players as well, whether it's a full shot or a putt. That would speed up play, I'm certain!

The organisers at Sawgrass had the luxury of knowing that, if they completely lost control of the greens, they were being dug up on Monday anyway. But the weather was good, the scoring was good, so why risk doing what they did with the course set-up on Saturday?

All they did was make the players unhappy, and some of them were just made to look like amateurs on occasions, and it also slowed the pace of play down to a crawl. The average score rocketed to well over 76 per round, although they got away with it because Hideki Matsuyama fired a 67 and Ken Duke somehow got round in 65.

Duke beat the average score by 11 shots, which is a remarkable achievement. That's even better than Brandt Snedeker beating the final-round average score by nine strokes when he snatched the Farmers Insurance Open title with a superb 69 in brutal weather.

The difference was that in Sawgrass, the weather was fine. It was a normal, nice Floridian day, but the way they set the course up was anything but nice!

Sawgrass has never been a long course, and you don't need to whack a driver on all of the par-fours. Look at the last hole, where Jason Day got home with a two-iron and a wedge. Distance has never really been an issue there, it's all about strategy and keeping it in play.

Day did that better than anyone for two days and set a new 36-hole scoring record, but the change in conditions from Friday to Saturday was as extreme as I've ever seen, and that was because the greens were as fast as I've ever seen.

They weren't rock-hard, but the pace of the putting surfaces was incredible. Day said he was trying to lag from 10 feet away, and we saw so many putts roll 10 feet past the hole. It went too far, they got it wrong, and they pretty much admitted it to be fair. It was a "Shinnecock" moment!

As for Day, he went on to win for the seventh time in his last 17 starts - a run of form which looks Tiger-esque. But we can't compare Day to Tiger just yet. In fact, he's still a long way behind Rory McIlroy.

He's having a run of wins which we've seen Tiger put together, although Tiger did that over a sustained period of 15 years. Day's purple patch has lasted less than a year, so it's too early to draw comparisons with a 14-time major winner.

Last year it was Jordan Spieth being compared to Tiger, but I doubt if Spieth will ever have another year like that again in the majors. In fact, it will be tough for anybody to emulate that given the strength in depth of golf now.

The comparisons between Day and Woods are fair if you consider the Australian's form since last July, but will he ever get close to Tiger's win ratio of 25 per cent? Unlikely. McIlroy in 2014 and Spieth last year had similar Tiger-like winning runs, but neither was able to sustain it and that will probably be the case for Day.

That said, he's having a very good go at it and he's got a great all-round game. Immense length off the tee, solid iron play, and he's very good on and around the greens. And the way he is holing clutch putts exactly when he needs to, now that's a fair comparison with Tiger in his prime.

The way Day bounced back from a bad hole was also very impressive at Sawgrass. A prime example was on the tough third day, when he four-putted the sixth green before regrouping and knocking a stunning approach to the seventh to set up a tap-in birdie.

And then he had some chipping trouble at the ninth in the final round and duffed three in a row. But he holed a great putt to limit the damage to a six, and he shut the door on the field with birdies at two of the next three holes and played impeccably down the stretch.

One of the other talking points from earlier in the tournament was generated by the outfits worn by Rickie Fowler and McIlroy. Fowler has been sporting the jogging trousers and high-tops combination, and then McIlroy followed suit in the first round.

If I turned up for a round of golf wearing that, I'd have to remember to take some earplugs to mute the abuse I would get - especially if Richard Boxall was a witness! But, in all seriousness, there would be a lot of clubs that wouldn't let me near the course dressed like that.

Do they qualify as golf trousers? I'm not so sure. It looked to me like Rickie and Rory had parked their bicycles outside and forgotten to take the clips off! Do you think they would wear them when they weren't in front of the cameras? I don't think so.

I suppose you could argue that they've taken the plus-fours and moved the trouser further down the leg, while taking the shoe up. But it's not for me, and I don't think it was a coincidence that Rory wore them twice and shot his two worst scores of the week!

Robert's Sky Bet tips:

Irish Open: The K Club is an American-style course and it should suit the bigger hitters, so I'll go for the young Belgian, Thomas Pieters (50/1). It's a big run of tournaments on the European Tour now, and he'll want to push hard for a Ryder Cup place.

AT&T Byron Nelson: Brooks Koepka (28/1) was going well at Sawgrass until the conditions got the better of him on day three. He played well at Irving last year and fired four rounds in the 60s, so he'll be confident of contending this week.