Mr 59’s advice to shoot lower scores

The Englishman’s incredible 12-under, bogey-free 59 in the second round of the Portugal Masters on the Victoria Course at Dom Pedro was a rarely seen display of a golfer completely in the zone and performing close to his peak. 

Who better, then, to offer some advice on how to card your lowest-ever round?

Here are his top tips…

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The best place to save shots is your short game and putting. Most amateurs lose the majority of their shots on the greens so, first thing first, you need to work on your distance control with the putter and holing out.

Holing out is so important when you’re trying to get a score going. You watch the guys on tour, they’re holing out from five or six feet nearly all the time but the opposite is probably true of amateurs. That’s why practising those putts every chance you get is so important. That’s what wins you tournaments. When you look at the stats, it’s the guys who putt well who are up there near the top of the leaderboard most weeks.

• Why you ought to ditch the flop shot

You need to have a pretty clear plan on what you’re working on. There’s no sense in just walking onto the practise green and hitting random putts. You need to say, okay, this session is about green reading, or this session is about technique. You need to have a purpose.

Practising green reading is massively underrated. You read putts on every single hole – but how much time do you reckon you spend practising reading them? It’s important to do that because your eye can go out a little bit from one round to the next. People talk about training every part of your game. Well, that’s one of them.

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