Tuesday 15 March 2016 19:41, UK
Paul McGinley is expecting next month's Masters to be one of the most closely contested in recent history with so many players having a realistic chance at the first major of the year.
Adam Scott has been in the best form of the world's top 10 over the last month, following up his second-placed finish at Riviera with back-to-back victories in the Honda Classic and the WGC-Cadillac Championship in Florida.
But two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson, who pipped Scott at the Northern Trust Open, has also enjoyed an excellent start to the year while defending champion Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy are expected to be in contention on Sunday afternoon at Augusta.
"Ideally, all the players want to be where Adam Scott is right now," McGinley told Sky Sports News HQ. "He's gone second-win-win in his last three starts, and that's where you want to be. But that's not always applicable and not everybody can have that kind of form.
"I think Jordan Spieth is there or thereabouts, but you could raise an argument for six or seven guys who are going into the Masters with a lot of form and a lot of history around there, and there's no reason why they can't win. It's going to be a very exciting Masters, and it's very difficult to pick a winner."
Spieth is widely regarded as the best putter in the world, while McIlroy's change to a cross-handed grip for the first World Golf Championship event of the year at Doral resulted in an improved performance on the greens which will stand him in good stead for the Masters.
McGinley added: "Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and Spieth's strength is definitely his putting. He started off like a train at Augusta last year, and Rory McIlroy was 11 or 12 shots behind before he had even started his second round.
"Jordan put such a huge distance between himself and the rest of the field and went on to win his first Masters. But the putting is the strongest part of his game. He's not blessed with the kind of power that Bubba Watson or Rory McIlroy has, but we'd all like to be able to putt as well as Jordan Spieth.
"The interesting thing about Rory's putting is he's always felt he is left-hand dominant with the putter. So he changed to a left-below-right putting grip at Doral and still felt his left hand would control the stroke. The way he putted in the second and third rounds at Doral were as good as he's ever putted.
"I think that will give him a lot of confidence and inspiration going into the Masters. We know how good his long game is, and when he gets hot with the putter, he's pretty formidable."
McIlroy is currently the favourite with Sky Bet as he bids to complete a career grand slam of majors, but McGinley added: "It's so difficult to pick a winner, particularly when the difference between the top 10 players in the world is so small. Anybody can turn up, show a bit of form and win.
"We saw that when Charl Schwartzel won the Valspar Championship at the weekend. He's won at Augusta in the past, so you can't discount the likes of him and Louis Oosthuizen, who won in Australia a couple of weeks ago. Louis lost out to Bubba in a play-off in 2012, and Bubba has won twice around there now.
"There's a lot of good form and trends in terms of Bubba's stats this year, so you've got to look closely at him. This is what's going to make the Masters to exciting, you can build a case for so many different players."
The feature of Scott's remarkable recent form has been his outstanding putting after he was forced to revert to a traditional-length putter following the ban on anchored putting that was enforced at the start of the year.
"Adam used the long putter for years because he basically had the yips with the short stick," McGinley said. "He won the Masters using the long putter and then had a couple of average years, and then he was forced to go back to a traditional putter because of the ban on the anchored technique which came in on January 1.
"And over the last month, he's actually putted better than he ever has, but can he hold onto that form for another month? That's the big question, because we know how hard it is to sustain that kind of form for any length of time. But certainly he has the form and the confidence at the moment, and obviously he's a past winner at Augusta."
