Harrington remains two shots clear

Padraig Harrington took a two-shot lead into the final round of the Tour Players' Championship of Europe on Sunday after Irish players dominated the third day's action.

Tiger Woods, the tournament favourite and holder for the last two years, struggled again, though, and only mustered an error-strewn 70 which left him nine strokes behind.

Harrington's two-under-par 70 took him to 15-under-par 201, two better than young Northern Irishman Graeme McDowell, who carded a 68.

Two players are a further stroke back, South African Retief Goosen and Denmark's Mads Vibe-Hastrup.

Woods conceded he would "probably not" take his third successive TPC title and fourth in five years after struggling with his driving as well as having no luck on the greens.

No-one is ruling the world number one out, though. In 1998 he was eight strokes behind Ernie Els in the Johnnie Walker Classic in Phuket, Thailand, and went on to beat the South African in a playoff.

Irish Ryder Cup player Harrington, who last week led the Benson and Hedges International Open before finishing second for the 19th time as a professional, said there were plenty of dangers other than Woods who could deny him.

"Retief is capable of shooting the same scores as Tiger, so you're not afraid of one person -- unless it's yourself," he said after his round which followed cards of 65 and 66 which put him in the lead for the third day running.

"I fell asleep a couple of times today," he admitted.

Among Harrington's more likely final-day threats is another Irishman, Ulsterman Darren Clarke, lying four strokes back.

Clarke reduced his chances of completing the job he left undone in 1998 when he finished second at Gut Kaden to Lee Westwood, after he double-bogeyed the short 16th, losing a ball by thinning a greenside bunker shot into heavy rough.

But it could have been two shots worse. Clarke thought he had found his ball and played out of the bunker to eight feet.

He then discovered it was not his ball and, on the advice of a Royal and Ancient Golf Club referee, played another ball to a foot and holed it.

Under R and A Rules he should have carried on with the ball he had found and putted out from eight feet, but was absolved from penalty by European Tour chief referee John Paramor because he had been wrongly advised.

Paramor, who only two weeks before had penalised Severiano Ballesteros a stroke for slow play in Italy, then needed to check, under Tour rules this time, that the ball Clarke had found and played was a similar constituency ball. It was the same type, so he escaped penalty again.

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