Moving to the first hole, his second shot got stuck badly in the thorny bush. Off the penalty drop he reached the edge of the green, having to two-putt to the hole.

A minor respite came in a second hole birdie, but the chill really caught up thereafter.

The 35-year-old trusts this course so much, that he didn’t imagine himself in trouble even after the errant tee shot on the par-four sixth found the bush. But with his father Brig Randhir Singh and Milkha Singh looking on, it was a long walk back to the tee box.

The chip out from the greenside bunker on the right left him with too long a putt. On a day when the touch was just not there — he was already two-over by then — the roll missed the target to give him a triple bogey. He bogeyed the next too, three putting the par-three seventh. A terrific chip-putt on the eighth gave him the only second birdie on the par-five eighth, but by then he was at the point of no return.

LEADERBOARD

136 Damien McGrane (Irl); 138 Hendrik Buhrmann (RSA), Graeme McDowell (NIR), Raphael Jacquelin (Fra);

139 Mikael Lundberg (Swe); 140 Arjun Atwal (Ind), Thomas Bjorn (Den), Digvijay Singh (Ind), Benn Barham (Eng), etc;

141 Darren Clarke (NIR), Henrik Nystrom (Swe), SSP Chowrasia (Ind);

142 Brendan Jones, Jyoti Randhawa (Ind) etc.;

143 Phillip Archer (Eng), Ross McGowan (Eng), etc;

144 Simon Yates (Sco), Gaurav Ghei (Ind), etc;

... contd.