sport news OLIVER HOLT: The inaugural LIV Invitational Series event at Centurion Club was ... trends now
Maybe they spent too much on executioners back home. Maybe they spent too much on those new green and white Newcastle United kits whose magical properties will make Eddie Howe's side look like the Saudi Arabia national team next season while simultaneously managing to give the fans their club back.
Whatever the reason, there's got to be some explanation for why an organiser as fabulously wealthy as the Saudis managed to make the first event of its breakaway LIV Golf series look like a low-rent, low-wattage, low-brow, low-end, poor man's version of It's A Knockout.
The black cabs, the old warplanes overhead, the fake soldiers in their red tunics and bearskins? These were not exactly the symbols of a revolution, which is one of the many overblown claims LIV Golf makes on behalf of itself. This wasn't a revolution. This was just the coronation of an old king called Cash.
Warplanes flew above Centurion Club during the first event of the controversial LIV Series
Shot just got real? 'Cash just got real,' you mean. Just say it. At least that'd be honest. There was only one reason why the players were at Centurion Club in Hertfordshire last week. 'Boatloads of cash,' Rory McIlroy suggested from the other side of the Atlantic. And he was right.
There is nothing wrong with chasing cash apart from the small matter of whose hand works the cash dispenser. Because, in this case, that would be the same hand that wielded the bone-saw.
The European Tour, now the DP World Tour, sanctioned an event in Saudi Arabia until recently, of course, which complicates its ethical position on LIV Golf so each person has to ask themselves where their red line lies, the line they are not prepared to cross.
Cash is the main motivator for the players who have defected to compete in the breakaway
Greg Norman sparked a backlash before the event when he spoke about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi
That's the problem with LIV Golf: whichever way you cut it, however much you
