South African Open Betting Tips: Back Dylan Frittelli to go well in South Africa

Last week’s Joburg Open produced one of the best stories of the year on the DPWT, as Wakefield’s Dan Bradbury – who only turned pro earlier this year – won on just his sixth start as a professional. He arrived at Houghton Golf Club with no status on any tour, having failed to even make it past Stage One of the DPWT Q-School, albeit unfortunately and only got into the tournament via a sponsor’s exemption. 

Incredible then, with so much on the line – not just a first pro title but all that comes with that: a two-year exemption on tour and a spot in The Open – that he looked so confident and assured; leading the event from his 8-under 63 in round one to signing off with a closing 67, beating a group of strong DPWT winners by three strokes in the process.

A hugely impressive performance from Bradbury and though it now means he can enjoy these early years of his career as a fully fledged member of the DPWT, it will be interesting to see how he progresses; with attention on him no doubt set to increase.

The DPWT’s three-week stay in South Africa continues with the South African Open at Blair Atholl Golf Estate. This grand old tournament is over a century old and has been dominated by the greats of South African golf, with Gary Player the winning-most player in the event’s history on 13 titles: the likes of Ernie Els, Bobby Locke and Retief Goosen all possessing multiple victories.

The event regains DPWT status this year – something it had held every year since 1997 until last year – there it was played as solely a Sunshine Tour event, with restrictions in South Africa due to the pandemic meaning the DPWT couldn’t co-sanction the tournament.

Daniel Van Tonder won there at Gary Player Country Club, defeating fellow countryman Oliver Bekker and becoming the fourth South African winner in a row. A very strong South African contingent will be hoping to keep it here and make it a quintet of consecutive home winners in a row this week.

The Course

The South African Open has had a nomadic status since its inception, though typically returns to courses that have hosted before. This week, the private and exclusive Blair Atholl Golf Estate will be making its debut as host of this historied tournament; a course that is still very unfamiliar to most, having only ever played host to one prior event on the Sunshine Tour: the Blair Atholl Championship last year.

Blair Atholl is simply a monster. Designed by Gary Player on the site of his old family farm, this par 72 is one of the longest courses in the world, playing to 8231 yards from the back-tees – a length that even when taking altitude into account, is insanely long.

There are five par 5s, four of them measuring over 600 yards and three of them over 630; four of the seven par 4s are 500 yards+, which includes the ridiculously long 560 yard 15th hole; with four of the five par 3s over 200 yards, three over 230.

Not just big in length but everything else about this course is huge. The sloped greens - protected by runoffs - and abundant bunkers which are well placed both on the fairways and around the greens, are amongst some of the largest you’ll find anywhere in South Africa, whilst the fairways are extremely wide.

Elevation changes add further difficulty, while the Crocodile River that flows throughout the course means water is in-play on around half of the holes.

The Stats

There is little to go off statistically, with just that one previous event having been staged here and that was on the Sunshine Tour where we don’t have individual tournament stats. Much like last week it means there’s a fair bit of guesswork goes into figuring out what is needed around here.

As you’d expect with the length of this course and the generosity of the fairways, there’s many players who went well in that tournament last year who don’t lack for power off-the-tee: winner Luke Brown looks a player at his best with driver, ranking top 50 in both driving distance and driving accuracy on the Sunshine Tour when winning here, whilst Keagan Thomas in 2nd and Louis Albertse in 4th are two of the longer hitters on tour.

Bombers should have the advantage and those who are able to combine that with either a high-class approach performance or hitting a large amount of these huge greens, plus having a good week with the putter will have the key ingredients to success; with some emphasis also put on par 5 scoring due to the five such holes around this venue.

Key Stats: Driving Distance, SG: Approach / GIR + SG: Putting, Par 5 scoring

Correlating Courses

Gary Player Country Club at Sun City – host of the Nedbank Challenge and the 2020/2021 South African Opens, as well as multiple events on the Sunshine Tour - looks a course worth considering. Another long Gary Player design played at altitude.

Two further Gary Player courses of note would be next week’s Alfred Dunhill Championship venue, Leopard Creek, which has hosted that tournament since 2005 and Fancourt Golf Links, host of the Dimension Data Pro-Am since 2010 on the Sunshine Tour and most relevantly in the last three years has been a co-sanctioned event with the Challenge Tour, resulting in many of this year’s graduates having experience at the venue.

Outside of South Africa, the Green Eagle’s North Course, the host of the Porsche European Open is a lengthy course that is well bunkered, with generous fairways; I’m also inclined to pay some attention to Abu Dhabi Golf Club, host of the Abu Dhabi Championship until this year and the DP World Tour Championship host, the Earth Course at the Jumeirah Estates for similar reasons.

The Weather

It’s set to be another wet week in South Africa, with rain due to fall on Thursday and then over the weekend, lengthening this course even more; with thunderstorms potentially to follow, though only a mild breeze predicted throughout the week.

The forecast was more bleak last week and though we had a couple of stoppages, play was comfortably completed; hopefully the same applies to this week.

The Field

Though Christiaan Bezuidenhout doesn’t play, we have a much stronger field here than last week. With Branden Grace, Dean Burmester and Dylan Frittelli all bolstering that home challenge, along with Charl Schwartzel – who is a member at the course.

The European contingent is also much stronger, owing to the arrival of players such as Adrian Otaegui, Marcus Armitage and Jorge Campillo, whilst Dan Bradbury gets straight back at it, looking for what would be one of the most remarkable back-to-backs in memory.

As with last week, there are players yet to qualify, with three one-round qualifying events scheduled for tomorrow, where the field will be completed.

Selections

The top of the market is strong. Branden Grace is a former South African Open winner, possessing an excellent record at home in general, whilst Dean Burmester has been in good form at the start of his first season out on the PGA Tour.

The likes of Thriston Lawrence and George Coetzee add more strength to the top of the market and though we saw a big priced, surprise winner last week, those that followed Bradbury were all seasoned pros; the next three on the leaderboard all DPWT winners themselves and I expect that we’ll see similarly high quality contenders this week.

Those at the very top all have question marks over them but I’m not going too far down; I’m going to start with a man who also went well last week, finishing 9th and had been trending in the right direction prior to that, Romain Langasque.

Romain Langasque 33/1 – 1/5 8 places (Bet365) – 1.5 pts ew

After a hugely positive start to the year - that saw Langasque finish in the top 25 in eight of his first fourteen starts - his form took a serious nosedive at the end of August, seriously struggling with his ball-striking.

Though still unconvincing in this regard, there were improvements for Langasque three starts ago in the Nedbank Challenge and he kicked on from that on his next start in the DP World Tour Championship, producing his best ball-striking performance since finishing 5th in the BMW International Open in June, helping him to a 20th place finish in Dubai.

Langasque improved again last week in the Joburg Open, exceeding even that ball-striking performance in Dubai, back to those performances which engineered his good start to the year and the resulting 9th place finish was his first top 10 since the BMW International. 

Combined with continued strong performances on the greens and holding more than enough power off-the-tee, the classy Frenchman looks well placed to add to his solo DPWT victory to date – which came in 2020’s Wales Open – this week in South Africa.

As always, it’s sensible to have a strong hand of home players in these co-sanctioned events and though his results haven’t necessarily shown it, there’s been enough positivity about Dylan Frittelli’s performances in the fall-season on the PGA Tour to suggest he can have a big week here.

The year has been a solid one for Frittelli, though despite only missing nine cuts in twenty-eight, there’s been few contending performances, with just the one top 10 in the Texas Open in April to show for it.

However it’s hard to pinpoint what has caused his underwhelming results as throughout the year, each area of his game has looked in decent enough shape and he hasn’t really gone through a prolonged lull in performance in any area; more an inability to put everything together at the same time.

This continued into the new season, in which Frittelli has missed four of seven cuts, with a best of 13th in the Sanderson Farms Championship in October. Over those seven starts he’s driven it well at points and produced some quality iron play, no more so than when missing the cut last time out in the RSM Classic; and has also had some good weeks with the putter. His game really doesn’t look that far away.

This historically strong, lengthy ball-striker should appreciate this step down in grade - albeit with the heightened expectations of performing at home – at a venue that sets up well for him if 4th and 7th place finishes at the Earth Course, as well as a 3rd in this tournament at Gary Player Country Club in 2020 are anything to go by.

Another from the home presence and I found it impossible to ignore Louis De Jager’s form in the second half of this year on the DPWT, with a 5th place finish last week the latest piece of evidence for how well he’s currently playing.

This was just a continuation of the form De Jager was showing at the end of the previous DPWT season, as he picked up three top 10s in his final eight events: 3rd in the Czech Masters, 6th in the Open de Espana and 9th in the European Masters.

This was aided by quality off-the-tee and on the greens, much the same as last week, though in addition he produced one of his best approach performances of the year in the Joburg Open – an area in which he often struggles – hopefully something he can keep rolling this week.

If he does, this big-hitter has all relevant areas firing to enable him to handle this test - strong top 20 performances on solo visits to Gary Player Country Club in the 2020 South African Open and the Porsche European Open further attesting to his suitability for this – and he can make the fifth professional victory of his career by far the biggest and most important here at Blair Atholl. 

I’m going to take a punt on 2016 South African Open champion, Brandon Stone at a tasty price here. He’s struggled for form for most of the last couple of years but continues to drive it well, showing much more positive signs in approach and with the putter last week too; if able to replicate a similar level of improvement in those areas this week, he could look a huge price by Sunday afternoon.

There have been few bright sparks in his year, missing nearly half of his cuts and finding just four top 20s, though rather importantly, the best of those performances came when finishing 5th in the European Open, a course that could prove a good guide to this week.

That result on a long, open course is not a surprise for a player who has always been all about driver since turning pro. Indeed, despite his poor form on tour this year, he still ranked 27th off-the-tee, regularly putting himself amongst the longest hitters on tour too.

This is a good starting point for this week on this mammoth course and he’s not unaccustomed to winning on Gary Player designs having taken home the Alfred Dunhill Championship in 2016.

That was the second of three DPWT wins for Stone, the third of which came in the 2018 Scottish Open, whilst he’s also won twice on the Sunshine Tour – the most recent of which came in the Limpopo Championship in 2021, an event co-sanctioned with the Challenge Tour.

If the driver continues to fire and he can find that little extra with the irons and the putter this week, Stone can remind everyone of the talent he has and would be a huge danger in this field at a course bound to suit.

I’m going to sign off with a couple of big priced Europeans who pack plenty of punch off-the-tee, starting with the talented young Spaniard, Alejandro Del Rey.

This former #32 amateur’s DPWT future was still well in the balance heading into the final day of Q-School a couple of weeks ago. He sat 20th heading into that final round and with just the top 25 finishers gaining a card, he needed to finish well.

This he did, firing an 8-under 63 - the best round of the day - showing fantastic mental strength not just because of that situation alone but because just a week earlier he’d narrowly missed picking up a tour card on the Challenge Tour, finishing 22nd on their Race to Mallorca standings; only the top 20 eligible for the promotion to the main tour. 

That was rather unfortunate for Del Rey, as he’d enjoyed a very good year on the Challenge Tour; including a victory in Germany – his second professional win after winning on the Alps Tour on just his third start as a pro - and four further top 10s to go with it.

This not a shock for a player who made a name for himself in the amateur ranks, winning individual honours in the prestigious Eisenhower Trophy in 2018, beating players such as Collin Morikawa, Min Woo Lee, Takumi Kanaya and the Hojgaard twins in the process.

On talent alone he’d be of obvious interest but he looks an ideal fit for this week. From his handful of starts on the DPWT over the last few years we know he hits it a mile off-the-tee, something he showed last week in his 30th place finish in the Joburg Open; a result largely engineered by a strong all-round ball-striking display and if able to replicate that this week, he’s sure to go well.

Germany’s Alexander Knappe is back for his second stab at the DPWT, having qualified for the tour in 2017 following a stellar season on the Challenge Tour in 2016, where he picked up two victories. He’s doubled that this year, with a further two wins on the Challenge Tour helping him finish 3rd on the Race to Mallorca to comfortably earn his tour card; he’ll be hoping for better luck this time around on the main tour.

He missed the cut last week but is easily forgiven as he actually played some quality golf tee-to-green over the first two days, with a really poor couple of days with the putter his undoing.

Knappe was one of the biggest hitters on tour in 2017 and hasn’t lost any of that distance, ranking top 10 of the recorded players in driving distance last week in Joburg and should find this test to his liking.

An impressive record in the Dimension Data Pro-Am provides further encouragement; he won there earlier this year and has finishes of 4th and 14th at the Gary Player designed venue to boot. I’m also buoyed by good form in the European Open, where he’s twice finished top 25 and if able to repeat the strength of his tee-to-green performance last week and rectify his putting, he can get his second stint on the DPWT going at Blair Atholl this week.