The Thursday morning restart at the WGC-Accenture Match Play has been pushed back yet again to Noon local time (2 p.m. ET). The sun has finally come out at Dove Mountain, so PGA Tour officials are counting on a quick thaw and melting of the snow cover that blanketed the course this morning.
2013 WGC-Accenture Match Play tee times delayed again, Tiger Woods scheduled around 4 p.m. ET
The PGA Tour has pushed play back yet again at Dove Mountain, with play set to restart at 2 p.m. ET.
This is the third change to the scheduled start time on Thursday morning, with officials repeatedly pushing things back from the original 10:30 a.m. ET restart. If there are no further delays, the remaining nine matches should go off at the following times:
All times ET:
2:10 p.m. -- Peter Hanson vs. Thomas Bjorn
2:20 p.m. -- Louis Oosthuizen vs. Richie Ramsay
2:30 p.m. -- Branden Grace vs. Robert Garrigus
2:40 p.m. -- Luke Donald vs. Marcel Siem
2:50 p.m. -- Paul Lawrie vs. Scott Piercey
3:00 p.m. -- Rory McIlroy vs. Shane Lowry
3:10 p.m. -- Rickie Fowler vs. Carl Pettersson
3:20 p.m. -- Tiger Woods vs. Charles Howell III
3:30 p.m. -- G. Fernandez-Castano vs. Francesco Molinari
While the restart is set for 2 p.m. ET, the first tee time should not go off until 10 minutes later because there are still two groups on the first hole and out in the fairway.
Darkness should hit the Tucson area just after 6 p.m. local (8 p.m. ET) so if there are no further delays, that leaves only six hours of daylight. Unless it’s a blowout, it’s hard to see any second round match concluding on Thursday, which was originally the day when the field gets trimmed from 32 to 16. The best the PGA Tour can hope for at this point is to have the field cut down to 32 by the end of Thursday. Golf Channel has already announced that they will extend their broadcast until play is called for the day.
The weather is expected to clear up for the rest of the week, but almost a day and a half lost to the inclement weather puts Mark Russell and the Tour in a bind as they push for a Sunday finish. Sun-up to sun-down golf was already scheduled for Sunday, with both the final four and Championship matches on the docket. It’s much easier to work around inclement weather when the field is smaller, but the delays at the start of the week, with 64 players still alive, make things exceedingly difficult. Here’s hoping 2 p.m. ET is the start of uninterrupted play for the rest of the week.
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