No sooner does the order of merit finish than the Race to Dubai starts and we'll have more runners and riders than ever heading towards the Middle East.

Augmenting our regular crop of Tour players will be Dave Horsey, who won the Challenge Tour with distinction and Gary Lockerbie, who bounced back among the big boys very quickly after missing out in 2007.  I'm sure they will both acquit themselves very well during these new and exciting times.

All in all, we had a very successful year with pride of place going to Lee Westwood, who finished third on the money list and celebrated by going to have his troublesome tonsils removed.  Watch out for him to climb higher up the world rankings and he finished the season inside the top 10.

Jeev Milkha Singh, the original have-clubs-will-play, was 12th on the money list closely followed by Darren Clarke, James Kingston and Richard Finch, giving us five players in the top 20... and we had another five in the top 50 plus 10 others kept their cards.

There were excellent first seasons for Rory McIlroy (36) and Ross McGowan (70) while Chris Wood showed a fantastic attitude after turning professional to win E100, 000 in just 8 events.  I'm sure he'll do well at stages 2 and 3 of Tour School and go on to be a star of the future.

On the cricket front, there was a massive build up to England's 20/20 for $20 million, but not much to shout about during the game.  We fell a long way short against the Stanford Superstars probably because we were under-prepared.