sport news Sort out this bitter rules row or risk a breakaway

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How are the new rules going down at your club? In my regular fourball, we’ve got one man who wants the flagstick left in every time he putts, one who sometimes wants it left in, and two of us who will usually putt with the flag out.

In other words, on several greens during every round, you’ve got the flag being taken out and then put back in again before being taken out once more, rather destroying the purpose of the new regulation, which is to speed up play.

At our level, it’s just a tad irritating and usually leads to some ribald banter. On the professional circuit, it’s hard to overstate how badly the new rules have gone down with the elite on the two main tours.

When you get to the point where someone as classy as Rickie Fowler is joining in the ridicule, you know you’ve got problems.

‘We all want to grow the game but you’re not going to do that making guys do unathletic things,’ said the American, referring to his pet hate — the new rule requiring players to drop from knee rather than shoulder height. He illustrated his point by likening the drop to squatting on a toilet.

It has led to a level of rancour I’ve not known in all my years writing about golf, and talk of revolution. For the first time, it is now possible to see a day where the professional game breaks away from the two governing bodies in charge of the rules — the USGA in America and the R&A worldwide — and forms its own laws.

How on earth has it come to this, where you get a situation on Saturday night when the USGA thinks Twitter is the correct forum to tell Justin Thomas that ‘we need to talk’ and tries to embarrass him by claiming he had cancelled planned meetings?

The new rules were meant to lead us away from

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