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TURKISH AIRLINES OPEN

November 2, 2016

Danny Willett

Antalya, Turkey

DANNY WILLETT: It was a long week last week, not playing great, so yeah, got in yesterday afternoon and trying to catch up on a little bit of sleep.

Went out and played nine holes today and a bit of practice and the Pro-Am tomorrow. Weather is good, from what we've seen of the golf course this morning, the golf course is in very good condition I'd say. It's a fun little track. Obviously tree-lined and you've got the floodlights for the guys to play night golf through other parts of the year. I think we're all set for what could be a really good week.

Q. Do you make it very much a resort course? Is it there for the taking?
DANNY WILLETT: Yes and no. It's heavily tree-lined obviously. There's room there between the trees but it's heavily-tree lined so you can't be silly wayward. You can afford the couple of errors here and there I guess, and the greens are running fantastic, so I think you will see a low winning score this week. All wind dependent and stuff. It was blowing-ish today, nothing too daft, but it was enough there to make it interesting.

Q. Did you have any doubts about coming?
DANNY WILLETT: No, I was in regular contact with Keith, obviously, and the Tour, Keith Pelley and Hendrik, the player relations guy, and obviously speaking to Chubby a lot. It was one of them where if the tournament was happy to go ahead like we made the decision to go down to Rio quite early and we stuck by it all the time; you know, there's people, there's a lot greater things here at risk.

If the guys say that everything's okay down here, then we were always going to come down. We were basically only going to pull out if the tournament wasn't on. We're down here now and there's no sign of anything. In and around here it's been lovely, so hopefully it stays that way for the full week.

Q. And it is a good tournament in a beautiful part of the world that deserves supporting, doesn't it?
DANNY WILLETT: It is. The hotel is fantastic this week, the regular Regnum we are in this week, and the Maxx Royal the last two years has been great and that golf course is really good fun.

The guys are saying more of the same this week. Fantastic hotel, you get looked after brilliantly, and then you come to a very nice venue where it's good fun to come and play golf. It's 20-odd degrees, the sun is out, there's a bit of wind there, the family are by the pool enjoying themselves. It's just a lovely week.

Q. Race to Dubai, you've been leading all the way through and now it's getting very tight?
DANNY WILLETT: Well, it's not that tight, is it. Yeah, he did -- I had a terrible week last week and it was one of them things where anything that went wrong, could go wrong and didn't play great. And then just to put the icing on the cake, obviously Henrik and Rory both finishing up there.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that he's jumped us but we were never going to win The Race to Dubai on the amount we were on. We always had to bump it forward and that's still the aim. Got to go out here this week, and hopefully the golf game gets a little better and we just keep working forward.

We've obviously got Nedbank next week and then The Race to Dubai finale in three weeks' time. So there's still a lot of golf left. I've just not been playing very well, so that's the main aim of the next three weeks.

Q. I'm sure you wanted to lead it all the way through, but does it provide that little extra incentive now that you're chasing, as well?
DANNY WILLETT: It does. It's good. Last year I played nice at HSBC and then Lake Malaren didn't play great and couldn't quite jump Rory. And obviously ended up going down. I think Rory was -- I can't remember what he was in front of us. To beat him, I think the criteria was we needed to beat him in Dubai and we finished fourth and he finished first.

So last year he ended up winning by a good margin but it was slightly closer than that and this year, obviously with myself and Henrik and Rory right there behind -- I think Dubai is going to be, again, depending that no one does anything silly the next few weeks, Dubai could be really, really good.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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