Video blog: How to tackle the bogey holes on your course

The golf season hasn’t quite arrived. We were teased with a couple of days where the mercury touched double figures, but it was a false dawn. It’s still winter.

I still haven’t managed to get a full round in (in England) this year so have been spending a fair bit of time at the driving range.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for me as one of my problems last year was too much time out on the course and not enough time practising.

A few extra hours on the range will do me no harm.

I’ve had plenty to work on too from all the sessions me and my coach Scott Oxley have had over the winter.

However, it is quite hard to gauge exactly how much progress you are making without getting out on to the golf course.

With this in mind, Scott and I decided to head out onto the course at Moor Allerton and put a few of things I have been working on into practise.

I’m playing this Saturday at Moor Allerton and know I’ll be teeing off from the 19th.

In my opinion, the 19th is one of the tougher tee shots out of the 27 and it’s the one nearest to the clubhouse. You don’t want to be re-loading when there’s an audience.

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Anything short (topped), left or right puts you in trouble and that’s not how you want to start a round.

The flip side of this (like on most tee shots) is that a fairly straight, airborne drive of about 200-220 yards is perfectly adequate.

It is quite easy to spook yourself into thinking a tee shot is more difficult than it actually is. This is where the pre-shot routine is vital to visualise where you do want to hit it rather than thinking about where you don’t want the ball to go.

So we picked out the 19th and the 27th as the two holes at Moor Allerton which unnerve me the most from the tee and decided to tackle them in a mature and sensible way.

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