February, 2019
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Moore sinks birdie to win playoff in Malaysia
Moore said the adrenaline rush he got from earning his place in the playoff by saving par at the final hole in near darkness on Sunday had carried him through the shootout.
While Woodland found the rough with his second shot on the par-five 18th, Moore’s approach shot took him to within three feet of the hole and he nervelessly sank the putt to earn a cheque for $1.26 million.
“Playing a playoff with someone like Gary, I know I don’t want it to last very long,” said the world number 45.
“I had a great opportunity there on 18 with my third shot, and it was just an absolute perfect number. It was 158 yards, a little bit back up the hill, so for me that was just a perfect slightly choked down full eight iron.”
Woodland would have won his third PGA title if he had not missed a birdie putt by centimetres on the final hole of his fourth round on Sunday.
“It was tough. It was a long hole, and Ryan hit a great shot in there and obviously made a good birdie,” the 29-year-old said.
“But I thought I hit a pretty good shot on the third, just obviously coming out of the rough, I would have liked to have been in the fairway, came out of the rough and came up a little short.”
Moore’s two previous PGA tour wins came at the Wyndham Championship in 2009, which he also won in a playoff, and at the 2012 Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in his home town of Las Vegas.
The CIMB Classic, which is co-sanctioned by the Asian Tour, was added to the official PGA Tour schedule for the first time this year.
(Writing by Nick Mulvenney; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
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Playoff win hands Moore third PGA title
Ryan Moore birdied the first playoff hole to beat Gary Woodland and capture the CIMB Classic title on Monday after an overnight wait caused by storms and darkness.
Moore had to fight just to get in the playoff, hitting an awkward 60-yard wedge shot on the 18th hole Sunday that dropped within several feet of the hole and allowed him to salvage par.
He and Woodland finished level at 14-under 274 on Sunday, with the playoff postponed until Monday due to fading light.
In the playoff, Moore hit a similarly well-placed approach shot with an eight-iron to the same green that stopped dead about five feet from the hole, setting up his winning birdie putt.
“I had a great opportunity there on 18 with my third shot and it was just an absolute perfect number,” he said.
“It was coincidentally the exact shot I was working on the range.”
It was Moore’s third PGA Tour title and came nearly a year after he won his second in Las Vegas.
Woodland, who was also trying to win his third PGA title, had a chance to end things as dusk was descending in a steady rain on Sunday evening but he barely missed a 10-foot birdie putt on the 18th that would have given him the title.
The players had endured about three and half hours of storm delays earlier in the day, which caused the playoff to be put off until the morning.
“Obviously I’d like to make that putt,” he said.
“I hit it where I wanted to, it just broke more. I can see it now, it was a little lighter out right now, I can see it broke a little more, but it is what it is.”
He pulled his approach shot to the 18th green wide on Monday, leaving himself a difficult chip shot from the rough that he couldn’t hole for birdie.
Still, it’s been a remarkable turnaround in form over the past few months for the American golfer, who has struggled with wrist injuries in recent years and a loss of form that had sent his world golf ranking plummeting to 268th this summer.
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Roar welcome Kewell challenge
A wounded Brisbane Roar have welcomed the prospect of their depth being tested by Harry Kewell’s return in Sunday’s home A-League clash with Melbourne Heart.
The Roar are still counting the cost of their 1-0 last round loss to Melbourne Victory in ex-coach Ange Postecoglou’s A-League farewell after Irish import Liam Miller went down with a calf complaint.
Brisbane’s decision to recruit 20 fulltime players and not the maximum 23 this season has already come back to bite, with Miller set to join striker Besart Berisha (hamstring), big name recruit Diogo Ferreira (groin), Kofi Danning and George Lambadaridis (knee) on the sidelines on Sunday.
The thought of Kewell (whiplash) returning to inspire a win-less Heart this weekend would be enough to ensure sleepless nights for Roar coach Mike Mulvey.
But Roar defender Shane Stefanutto said it sounded more like a dream.
“I want the marquee players to play,” he said.
“They are great for the league, great for the game.
“I want Harry Kewell to come up against us. They are great to match up against.
“I do hope Harry is ready. He’s a legend of our game.”
Ex-Socceroo Stefanutto also wondered why questions had already been raised about their depth.
“It’s been a focus of certain people saying that we don’t have a strong enough squad, but I have a lot of belief in our squad,” he said.
“I am looking forward to seeing the players who step in, we have a lot of faith in them
“It’s exciting.
“There’s a couple of injuries and people say ‘what are the Roar going to do this week’ but I am looking forward to the game already.”
Ladder-leader Brisbane’s season-opening winning run came to a shuddering halt with the last round loss but Stefanutto said his side were hardly shattered by the experience.
“The boys are in a pretty good mood to be honest. We are disappointed to lose but we went down there and had a crack at them,” he said.
“We tried to play our style but we came off on the wrong end.
“To be fair I think a draw would have been a fair result in a game between two pretty good teams but we move on.”
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Coffee Club expands into Persian Gulf
A Queensland-grown cafe empire is expanding its presence in the Middle East with The Coffee Club planning to open 100 new stores in the Persian Gulf within the next decade.
The group has signed a licensing agreement with Liwar Minor Food & Beverages, a joint venture between Al Nasser Holdings, an Abu Dhabi-based conglomerate with retail interests, and Minor Food Group, a Thai-based restaurant franchise whose parent company owns 50 per cent of The Coffee Club.
Under the deal, The Coffee Club will open cafes in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, by 2023.
“The GCC states represent huge growth potential for The Coffee Club brand and we are excited by the new partnership and look forward to the first store opening in the new year,” The Coffee Club’s chief executive Jason Ball said in a statement on Monday.
The Coffee Club owns 335 cafes in seven countries, including 267 in Australia.
It signed a deal in August to expand into Malaysia and plans to have a presence in 14 countries within the next decade.
The company, which started with a Brisbane city waterfront cafe in 1989, is Australia’s biggest home-grown cafe chain.
Rival Gloria Jeans owns 1000 cafes in 39 countries, including 400 in Australia, but it originated in the United States in 1979.
Thai hotels group Minor International, which owns Minor Food Group, bought a 50 per cent stake in The Coffee Club Group in 2008.
The Coffee Club’s Australian steak house subsidiary Ribs and Rumps operates in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates as well as Australia.
The Coffee Club’s existing Middle East presence consists of three cafes in Egypt.
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Russia readies for Olympic scrutiny
With a race against the clock to complete building works, threats of militant attacks and a controversy over an anti-gay law, Russia faces an unprecedented challenge to defeat its sceptics and hold a successful Winter Olympics in 100 days time.
The holding of the Winter Olympics in Russia’s southern city of Sochi, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the Olympic movement, has been championed by President Vladimir Putin as a showcase for the modern post-Soviet face of the country.
The Games from February 7-23, 2014, will mark a series of firsts and superlatives — the most expensive Olympics ever and the first Olympics of any kind in the ex-USSR.
The Black Sea port has long been a popular beachside holiday destination for Russians and was already developing alpine resorts in the mountains above. But Russia has faced the colossal task of building most of the stadiums, hotels and other infrastructure from scratch.
Both the coastal sites which will host events like ice skating and the opening ceremony and the mountain cluster where skiing and other high-altitude sports will take place still resemble building sites as workers hurry to finish the facilities on time.
The International Olympic Committee says that Russia will be ready despite the immensity of the task that has required a total budget of $US50 billion, the biggest in Olympic history.
To create Olympic standard facilities in a location that until recently was no more than a low-key winter sports venue, Russia has had to build new roads, an airport and railway lines as well as sports infrastructure.
“It was an extraordinary challenge of a kind that we have not seen in the Olympics, to organise a Games with only 10-15 percent of the facilities and infrastructure built,” said former French skier Jean-Claude Killy, head of the IOC’s Sochi coordination committee.
One thing the organisers cannot control is the weather — there have been fears of lack of snow even in the mountains — but nothing has been left to chance, with Russia stockpiling snow over the last winter just in case.
Sochi’s balmy resort climate belies its location close to a volatile area: the city lies at the foot of the Caucasus mountains which have become a hotbed of Islamic militancy and is barely half an hour’s drive from the Georgian rebel region of Abkhazia.
Russia is planning to launch a huge security operation to ensure the safety of visitors and participants at the Games, with 37,000 police expected to be deployed in and around the city.
Concerns about security intensified in July when wanted Islamist rebel leader Doku Umarov called for attacks on the Sochi Olympics which he said were being held “on the bones of our ancestors”.
A suspected female suicide bomber blew herself up on a bus packed with students in the southern Russian city of Volgograd on October 21, killing six people and raising security fears ahead of the Olympics.
Russian security experts have revealed that Russia is also planning to deploy a massive surveillance program to eavesdrop on communications which appears to be aimed not just at the Islamist underground.
Russia’s hosting of the Games has in many ways turned into a massive gamble — while the Kremlin wants to showcase a new face of the country, the event risks being overshadowed by a bubbling controversy over human rights.
Putin in June signed into law a bill banning the dissemination of gay propaganda to minors, an apparent attempt to buttress so-called “family values” which caused a global furore that appeared to take the authorities by surprise.
The Sochi Olympics rapidly became the focal point of opposition to the law, with the hashtag #boycottSochi becoming a leading Twitter trend, activists around the world boycotting Russian vodka and actor Stephen Fry — ironically a popular figure in Russia — making a well-publicised call for Russia to be stripped of its right to host the Games.
Putin in August also signed a vaguely-worded decree banning any protests in Sochi during the Olympics unless they were related to the Games — a move activists fear could be used against any attempts to hold gay rights protests.
The clampdown on civil society since Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term in 2012, the use of the legal system to punish political foes and even Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy are all likely to come under the microscope during the Games.
The build-up to the Games themselves has also been marred by allegations of rights abuses, with complaints of forced evictions, expulsion of migrants and environmental destruction.
When the Olympic flame arrived in Russia in October, Putin sought to take on Russia’s critics, saying that the Games would be hosted “with respect for equality and diversity” in line with “the ideals of the Olympic movement.”
Russia’s performance in the sporting events themselves is also a major concern for the political elite with a public used to the Red Machine’s all-conquering exploits in Soviet times hungry for home success.
After a disastrous performance at the last Winter Games in Vancouver, Russia is targeting a “podium” of third place on the overall medals table, according to Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko.