Fry's Electronics Open round four: Weir has always been at home at Grayhawk

Before the tournament started Mike Weir’s caddy, Brennan Little, described playing desert golf as “a little monotonous and dull". He may choose to revise that opinion after Sunday’s nail-biting wind-blown victory.

The irony of the result is that the winner did indeed turn out to be someone who knows the Grayhawk golf club very well, yet is also someone who has never actually played the course before. When he has been in Scottsdale previously, Weir has stayed in one of the homes on the Grayhawk property. But his focus was on the competition a mile down the road at TPC Scottsdale, so there was no time even to look at the Grayhawk courses, let alone play them.

The market sensed it was going to be the Canadian’s day as soon as he and Mark Hensby started to turn it into a two-horse race, even though it could so easily have gone to a playoff at the last. There was some mild excitement when Sean O’Hair joined the leaders for a tantalisingly short period, before dropping three shots on the last two holes. But the two leaders had too many holes in hand for his challenge to be credible.

Biggest victims of the windy conditions were Carl Pettersson - seven bogeys in 16 holes after keeping bogey-free for the previous 33 - and Ben Crane. Both struggled to find fairways and greens, but to add insult to injury Pettersson’s putter packed up on him too.

So two more events to go. After the highs of the FedEx Cup these “Fall Series” events feel a bit of a grind, especially because of the minuscule betting interest. That in turn has not been helped by the appalling live service punters get outside America. It’s not an original thought that here in the UK Setanta should be investigated under trades description legislation for describing their TV feeds as live. But they are not the only problem. The PGA Tour’s Tourcast should be heavily penalised for slow play and, to cap it all Sunday, XM Radio for some unexplained reason went silent on the internet.

There is anger in the betting forums that punters in America (presumably in Canada since internet gambling is prohibited in the US *polite cough*) are getting a huge drop on their transatlantic cousins in the live betting market, with prices more often than not reacting to events many seconds before any of the feeds we receive tell us what’s going on. In fact, the betting market has become the quickest way of following what’s going on! Small wonder if punters start to walk away.