By David Ferguson and Li Muqun
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Germany's Martin Kaymer triumphantly holds aloft the trophy under the Scottish summer sunshine.
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For the second Sunday in succession it was Germany's Martin Kaymer who took the title. The ice-cool Dusseldorfer kept his cool through a testing assortment of Scottish weathers to win the Barclays Scottish Open by two strokes from Gonzalo Fenandez Castano of Spain and France's Raphael Jacquelin.
Golfing legend suggests that no Scottish competition has ever completed four days of play without any rain. For three days Loch Lomond had basked in the sunshine, and thus it was inevitable that clouds would gather for the Sunday.
Overnight they duly did, and proceeded to shed their load upon those players unfortunate to be at the bottom end of the list in the morning. The wind blew, and light showers alternated with heavy downpours on the dejected figures of Michael Lorenzo-Vera of France and India's SSP Chowrasia.
The pair started the day joint-last at four-over, and struggled their way to finishes of seven-over and nine-over. The five thousand Euros they garnered for their efforts would have been welcome, but at the farthest extremities of the course they must have seemed rather hard-won.
The men at the top of the leaderboard would have had little inclination to sympathize with their drenched colleagues – the weather made it unlikely that there would be any spectacularly low scoring, which meant that the title would probably be battled over by those who were already well-placed at the start of play.
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Lee Westwood, Soren Kjeldsen, and Jamie Donaldson - but none could mount a sustained challenge.
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At five-under England's Steve Webster was just a little too far off the pace to threaten. He must have decided that the crowds huddled under their brollies were in need of warming-up, though, and he duly obliged with an exceptional feat. On the 190-yard par-3 5th he holed out in one, and on the very next hole he repeated the exploit with his approach from 113 yards, to card two eagles in the space of two holes. Unfortunately he picked the wrong par-3 for his demonstration of bravura – he needed a hole-in-one on the 17th to pick up the BMW Sports Coupé that was on offer.
Said Webster: "On 5 I hit a perfect 7-iron. I just said 'Be the one' - saw it hit the top of the ridge and roll down, then heard the crowd roar and that was that. The next hole I had 113 yards; it was a great looking shot, pitched past the pin, spun back, and then I heard the crowd roar again. I didn't actually see either of them go in, and I'll probably never do that again."
