Driver spoils the game plan for Tiger Woods

It wasn't so much a murmur of approval, as a gasp. For what seemed like an age, Tiger Woods and his caddie Joe LaCava had stood on the 11th tee at Royal Lytham, discussing the choice of club. Woods looked down the bunker-ridden fairway of the 598-yard par-five. "I'll have to hammer it to clear that one," he said.

But still he took the driver. And hence the gasp. And hence the groan that followed when he carved the shot off to the right and far into the rough. In truth, it was not the most dramatic of errors, for Woods had a relatively easy chop to get the ball back into the fairway on his way to salvaging a par. But there was a sense then that the 2012 Open Championship had just slipped from his grasp

He could have cranked up the pressure on Adam Scott, still leading at that point, with a birdie or better, but with seven holes remaining he was still five shots adrift.

So Tiger blew it when he abandoned the conservative strategy he had used for the previous three days? Not exactly. At the previous hole he had pulled out his driver for the first time, split the fairway and collected only his second birdie of the day.

After prodding the throttle he had no option but to push the pedal to the floor. You could just as easily argue that it was conservatism that got him into his pickle in the first place.

It was all those cautious irons off the tee over the first few days that had left him five shots back from Scott after three rounds. Scott may not have been much of a front-runner on the final day, but Woods has never been much of a chasing backmarker in the same circumstances. In every one of his 14 major successes to date, he held the 54-hole lead. He has never come from behind.

Small wonder that his first attempt at an overtaking manoeuvre should have ended with a crash. And it was an ugly one when it happened at the brutal par-four sixth. The sixth was a par five when the Open was last played here in 2001.

But it wasn't a five that Woods took, but a seven. "One yard," he muttered to LaCava as he watched his five-iron approach fly towards the green. Players talk to their caddies in clipped tones, for what he was really saying was: "One yard more and it won't drop into that leftover mineshaft of a bunker and leave me an impossible lie near the face." Unfortunately for Woods, the ball didn't pick up that yard in flight.

Woods examined all his options, and found that he didn't have any. Boldly, he tried to splash out towards the flag; inevitably, the ball ricocheted back towards him. It was a wonder, in fact, that he managed to avoid the thing - if it had struck him he would have been penalised another two shots - yet even when he did get out of the trap he still took three putts to get down. "The game plan was to shoot under par going out," Woods explained later. That would have meant something fewer than 34 strokes by the turn, not the 37 he managed. It would have meant putting early pressure on Scott, whose vulnerability would be horribly exposed by Lytham's last five holes.

Woods' tie for third was his fifth top-five finish since he won the most recent of his major titles at the 2008 US Open, a level of hopelessness to which most players would happily aspire. But having set the expectation bar so high in the past, his claims that everything is on track, that his game, as well as his reputation, is now out of rehab, will not be believed until he gets himself back in the winner's
circle.

Which means getting to the top of the leaderboard early. There was a sense of Tiger's threat around Lytham over four days but for the moment he's still all prowl and no pounce. "It's part of golf," Woods said. "We all go through these phases."

It was an odd summation from a player whose life's mission once seemed to be to distance himself from the hordes. That was the old Woods game plan. The one that made us gasp all the time.