A potent array of global golfing talent – including defending champion Padraig Harrington and past winners Michael Campbell, Bernhard Langer and José Maria Olazábal – will assemble in Cologne this week for the tenth anniversary edition of Linde’s sponsorship of the German Masters at Gut Lärchenhof.
The field will be chasing a first prize of €500,000 from a total prize fund of €3,000,000 as Langer, the co-promoter along with his brother, Erwin, seeks to win the title for an unprecedented fifth time, having been successful on home soil in 1989, 1991, 1997 and 2001.
Harrington, who landed the title last year just a few days before helping Europe to a record-breaking 18 ½ - 9 ½ victory over the United States in The Ryder Cup, returns to a happy hunting ground, where he narrowly missed out in a play-off to Sergio Garcia in 1999.
New Zealander Campbell, the new US Open Champion, attempts to follow up his victory in 2000 while Spanish favourite Olazábal aims to bridge a 17 year gap by adding to his 1988 success when the event was played in Stuttgart.
Also in the field are Campbell’s predecessor as US Open Champion, Retief Goosen of South Africa, and six members of Europe’s victorious 2004 Ryder Cup Team in Paul Casey, Harrington, David Howell, Miguel Angel Jiménez, Thomas Levet, Colin Montgomerie and Ian Poulter.
Montgomerie, runner-up in The Open Championship at St Andrews, joins another impressive second place finisher in Thomas Björn of Denmark, who came within one stroke of tieing Phil Mickelson in the US PGA Championship last month.
Completing a truly international line-up are Argentina’s Angel Cabrera, who won the BMW Championship in May, Sweden’s Niclas Fasth, who captured the Deutsche Bank Players’ Championship of Europe and Australian Mark Hensby, the Scandinavian Masters by Carlsberg winner.
Both Fasth and Howell will be bidding to secure a double victory on German soil. Fasth claimed his title at Gut Kaden in Hamburg in July while Howell won his first event in six years, the BMW International Open, in Munich just two weeks ago.
