March 31: An eager Anirban Lahiri will not need to wait long to tee off on Thursday as he sets off in the first group at in the morning at the Valero Texas Open on the PGA Tour. Lahiri will go out in the first group from the 10th tee alongside Sepp Straka and Kyoung-Hoon Lee at 7.25 am at TPC San Antonio.
Lahiri has not had a great run so far in 2021 and has made the cut in just two of the seven starts with T-39 at Puerto Rico as his best finish. The other cut he made was in the opening event of 2021 at Sony Open. What must also be worrisome is that he has not broken 70 in last 11 rounds and given away a lot of shots often as double bogeys.
Lahiri took the last week off and decided to skip the Corales Punta Cana event in Dominican to work on his game after missing the cut at Honda Classic before that. Lahiri, looking forward to playing in windy conditions in Texas, admitted he was disappointed at missing the cut at Honda at PGA National, and said, “I was a little disappointed to miss out on Honda. I think I had just started playing better. It (the week off) has been good consolidating some other things that I’ve been working on. I’m just trying to find that rhythm and building some confidence.
Lahiri is also looking forward to having his coach with him next week. “I also have a lot to look forward to working with my coach Vijay Divecha, who is coming for a few weeks from next week to work on my game. It’s been awhile since I saw him and be nice to do some consolidation before going into the final stretch of this year. I want to play my best and hopefully I can play well this week and play consistently.” At TPC San Antonio the trademark is Texas winds and trouble off the fairways, so Lahiri will need have a week of solid ball-striking.
Lahiri added, “I’m actually really looking forward to this week. I have been here couple of times before and it is actually quite windy and the golf course can get quite tight once it is windy. But I like playing windy golf courses. Like I said you know I’m really excited and interested to see how I can bring all the work that I’ve done over the last week or so into this week.”
On the season he added, “The last few tournaments in Florida I think I spent more time working on my game than actually playing my best in the tournament. I found myself in a place where I needed to put a lot of work into my golf. So to that extent I feel like last week was really good for me to build on some of the work that I had done.”
He went on, “I played a lot of golf on the West Coast which was primarily very cold and then from there I went into a stretch of tournaments which was quite windy and lot of times when we play lots of golf, week in and week out, the body kind of starts making adjustments to the conditions. I found myself having made too many adjustments and could not really keep my fundamentals as solid as I would have liked. You know how it is with golf, when you work on one department and you don’t work on the other, then you need to go back at work on the other so a little on the short game and putting, too.”
Texan Jordan Spieth, who has game has been trending well, will hope to get a look into the winner’s circle. Another Texan, Scottie Scheffler, and Matt Kuchar also got here after good weeks at WGC in Austin.
Some of the other stars in the field are Phil Mickelson, Rickie Fowler, Tony Finau, defending champ Corey Conners, Gary Woodland, Cameron Champ, last week’s winner in Dominican, Joel Dahmen, and Hideki Matsuyama.
