The Talk of Golf: Tyrrell Hatton has two tasty carrots to garnish his fast food feast

Tyrrell Hatton is on course to give Tommy Fleetwood a competitive race for the order of merit title after back-to-back wins
Tyrrell Hatton is on course to give Tommy Fleetwood a competitive race for the order of merit title after back-to-back wins Credit: AP Photo

So you win your second title in as many Sundays - making it a £1.42 million windfall in eight days - you are in Milan, one of the world’s great culinary cities, and where do you choose to have your celebratory meal? Tyrrell Hatton opted for Burger King.

If the young Englishman’s dietary tastes leave plenty to be desired, there can be no arguing with the Michelin-starred quality of his golf at the moment. Hatton is the hottest player in the world and is determined to carry on feasting until this year’s table runs dry.

Hatton will take this week off to prepare himself for the four-week run-in to the campaign which could fulfil a few boyhood dreams. In his desire (a) to win the European Tour’s order of merit title and (b) all but guarantee himself a debut in next year’s Ryder Cup, Hatton has decided to go all out in the final month of the season.

He will play in next week’s HSBC WGC Championship in Shanghai, travel from there to Antalya to appear in the Turkish Airlines Open, hotfoot it across to Sun City for the Nedbank Challenge and finish off in Dubai at the DP World Tour Championship. And if he remains in this kind of nick then he could well be going head-to-head with Tommy Fleetwood in a delicious finale at the Jumeirah Golf Estates.

The 26-year-old is still a little more than 1.5m points behind Fleetwood and while that represents an absurd amount of prize money (with one point roughly equalling one euro, throughout the season), the points handout is about to become ever more absurd after the sun sets on the Andalucia Masters on Sunday.

In China next week the winner will receive roughly 1.4m points - and for the final three events that will rise to 1.66m points each time. There is plenty of opportunity for Hatton to catch and pass Fleetwood and take the honour of becoming only the fifth Englishman  (after Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Justin Rose and Sir Nick Faldo) to top the order of merit.

However, at fifth in the current standings Hatton will also have to leapfrog Ross Fisher, Jon Rahm and Sergio García. However, García is not due to play in China, Turkey or South Africa. Rahm is missing Turkey and South Africa. Unless one of them wins this week at Valderrama they may find themselves giving up ground.

Like Hatton and Fleetwood, Fisher will play all four in the run-in and after two runner-up placings behind Hatton these last two weeks, the 36-year-old is clearly a winner in waiting. But also like Hatton and Fleetwood, it is not only the Race to Dubai that Fisher will be focusing upon.

Tyrrell Hatton with the Dunhill Cup
Tyrrell Hatton this month became the first player to win back-to-back Alfred Dunhill Links Championships  Credit: Duncan McGlynn/Action Plus via Getty Images

The Ryder Cup race is off and running as well and Hatton has taken a huge lead at the top of both the European Tour points list and the World Ranking points list. Yet it would be erroneous to suggest, as some have, that Hatton’s berth at Le Golf National is already assured.

Going on the 2016 qualification statistics he would require at least another 700,000 points to get through automatically on the first list and 60-plus rankings points on the second list. And when one considers that a change to the qualifying system means that tournaments from next May’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth will be weighted so that points won from then on will be multiplied by 1.5, it is easy to envisage Hatton needing another million European points and/or 100 ranking points.

Granted, Hatton must now be considered odds-on to secure a place beforenext August’s cut-off point, but he endured a slump in the summer which saw him missing six cuts out of seven, so is acutely aware how fickle this game can be.

And he is also in the form of his life and thinking there is no time like the present. Hatton could yet go into Christmas not only crowned as Europe’s No1, but blissful in the comfort that barring injury he will be teeing up against the likes of Jordan Spieth and co near Paris.

What a pair of carrots they happen to be. All he needs is to continue this incredible stretch and every burger in the land can be his.

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