PGA Championship Round 2 sees Europeans on top, but money on Tiger Woods

There’s going to be a lot of sorry heads come Sunday night if Tiger Woods doesn’t win the PGA Championship. Already at the half-way stage there’s all but £2.5m ($4.7m) on his head in the Betfair winner market alone. That’s a confident lot of squidollars with 36 holes to go. To put it in context, his nearest rival in the market is Phil Mickelson. The money on him is less than a 10th of Tiger’s.

Now I know stats, like rules, are there to be broken, but the Tiger nugget I like is that the six times he has opened a major with two rounds in the 60s he’s won every single one of them.

And if I was Tiger I don’t think my brow would crease from looking at the top of the leaderboard. Europeans Henrik Stenson and Luke Donald seem to be trying to rattle America’s cage ahead of the Ryder Cup, but I think Tiger will shove the bars back down their throats. It’s an amazing tournament for Billy Andrade, only playing because of a last-minute withdrawal, but I cannot see him putting one over on Woods.

Biggest worry, if I was Tiger, would be my playing partner over the last two days, Geoff Ogilvy, who emerged the clear moral victor of their threesome. I’m still not convinced this is his second major. The clear loser was Mickelson.