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Woosnam & Harrington
in final
Eleven years after his last
World Match Play victory, Ian Woosnam has moved within sight of a third title
with a crushing 10 and nine win over defending champion Lee Westwood.
The 43-year-old Welshman,
who will play Ireland's Padraig Harrington in the final, won his first title in
1987 and said he had been in the peak of his form that year.
But he will rarely have
played better than this week, claiming the scalps of U.S. Open champion Retief
Goosen and last year's runner-up Colin Montgomerie before finishing off Westwood
on the 27th hole of the scheduled 36-hole contest.
He collected seven birdies
in an almost flawless first 18 holes in the morning to turn seven up.
Woosnam did not let up on
the hapless European number one after lunch either, with birdies at the fourth,
sixth and eighth as he continued to show amazing touch with his broomhandle putter.
In all, the 1991 U.S. Masters
champion needed just one putt on 12 of the greens.
In the other semifinal,
Harrington beat Sam Torrance of Scotland four and three.
The Irishman trailed his
European Ryder Cup captain by two holes after 15 but clawed back to all-square
at the halfway mark and then won the first four holes of the afternoon's round.
Torrance reduced the deficit
to two holes with birdies at the seventh and eighth, but two bogeys at the 13th
and 14th left him needing a miracle to recover a second time.
The Irishman put the 48-year-old
out of his misery at the next hole after the Scot had duffed his tee shot under
a tree and could only take a bogey five.
Woosnam, an 18-1 outsider
at the start of the event and only invited to play because several top Americans
pulled out, believes he has every chance of winning his first title in four years.
"I've been swinging
well recently and thought that a win was just around the corner. Maybe this will
be it. There's no reason why not if I play like today," he said.
"But Lee struggled
today and didn't do anything very well. If you only make one birdie in 27 holes
as he did then you are going to lose - badly."
For Westwood, it was back
to the drawing board after playing superbly on Friday to beat Dane Thomas Bjorn.
"That's the way my
season has gone - one day good and the next bad," said the Englishman.
"But there's no point
getting angry about it. At least it wasn't raining, the course was in super condition
and I played like an idiot and he didn't."
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