And there we were, poor misguided fools, thinking we'd been watching one of the more thrilling tournaments of the year. But looking back, Woods was absolutely right. He did not have any of his best stuff, as he amply illustrated when he hit one drive under an SUV parked in the woods by the 14th fairway and another into the hospitality tents over on the 18th. He also had some badly injured ribs, which were strapped up during Sunday's final round. He did not make too much of this in his post-round press conference. Perhaps he did not want to further damage the already fragile psyche of poor Daly, who might have been under the impression he almost beat a fully fit Tiger Woods.

The rest of us are not bound by the same code of professional compassion, which means we can summarise Sunday's events thus: the world No1, playing averagely (by his standards), with a bad injury and a driver without a compass, beat the rest of the world comfortably, and took care of Daly in a play-off. What does that say about the state of men's golf? It says that it is suffering from a deficiency in competition. Or to use a more anglicised diagnosis, it is suffering from Premiership disease.

For Tiger, read Chelsea. At least Tiger did not buy his talent, he nurtured it from birth, but that biographical detail does not change the depressing fact that everyone else in the men's game is playing for second place, or in some cases, third place. "If I'd been offered third at the start of the week I would have taken it," Colin Montgomerie said afterwards, which is not the kind of thing you would expect to hear from a man with ambitions to win a major championship.