First of all a very Happy New Year to you all and hope you had a great Christmas. We had a family Christmas at home in London and had a fantastic time.

The weather was very poor over the Christmas period and I played just one round of golf at home between ending the season in Hong Kong and starting up again in South Africa. This was definitely a first for me as I usually play quite often but didn’t manage to get in any social golf at all.

A lot of practice was done in my indoor games room on my 15ft putting mat and Phil Kenyon was down a few times with me – I started working with him in Portugal at the end of last year, have been working diligently on my putting and it’s definitely starting to pay off. I also spent a lot of time in the gym working on golf specific exercises with Rob Watts, we also did plenty of cardio vascular, weights and the balance balls.

On 3rd January I left the UK for South Africa, which was extremely fortunate because I managed to miss all the snow! Rob Watts was with me down there so it was great to carry on where we’d left off at home. 

It was a good first week in East London at the Africa Open apart from my treble bogey on the final hole on Saturday afternoon, aside from that it would have been a very good week.

I did two clinics for kids development, one at East London and one in Joburg which were really exciting. There are such a lot of kids out there with a serious amount of talent which was great to see. I also made a donation from the Darren Clarke Foundation for the kids out there for which they were extremely grateful – 50% of the funds from the Foundation are for junior golf development and the other 50% for breast cancer charities.

I then went up to Joburg from East London on the Sunday night and played golf with one of my life-long heroes who I’d never played with before – the legendary Simon Hobday. We played at a fantastic new course near Joburg airport called Serengeti had a great day with him. In my opinion the guy swings the club better than anyone else – it’s exactly what I try do with my swing. We played against Brandon Pieters and Louis Martin and we had to let them win – of course we were just being nice to them. I do have to mention Mr Martin’s chipping – it definitely needs some serious attention – he had a double hit on the 4th hole which was an eighth of an inch away from a treble hit, it was extremely amusing for all of us, needless to say his chipping didn’t improve after that either!

I also played in the Joburg Open Pro-Am with the City manager and Gareth Tindall who is the Chief Executive of the Sunshine Tour and had a good day with them.

I played with Charl Schwartzel in rounds one, two and four of the tournament and played nicely – Charl won the event and played really well – having won the week before as well. As for my own game it was pretty good and nice to finish off chipping in for eagle on the last to finish tied second. I played very nicely from tee to green so came out with a lot of positives to go forward with. I need to get as many world ranking points as I can, I’ve just sneaked back into the top hundred again so I now need to keep going and  I want to make this Ryder Cup team so I have to get more points and the sooner I do that the better as it would also get me into the World Golf Championships again. I guess my goals for this year are to play better and climb up those world rankings.

I’m in Abu Dhabi this week and really looking forward to starting the tournament with some new TaylorMade equipment. I have a the R9 Supertri Driver which feels excellent and I’ve got new 54 and 58 degree wedges – these are amazing and have removable faces, and now that we’ve gone to V grooves and not square grooves, it means that I can put a new face into the wedge every week if I want to. The idea behind it is fantastic and as always TaylorMade lead the way with their ingenuity in golf equipment.

Also with me this week are my two boys, Tyrone and Conor, who are making the most of all the facilities at the Emirates Palace Hotel. It’s great to have them here and I love having their support when I’m out there playing.

That’s all for now and I’ll report in again soon.

Darren.