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NISSAN IRISH OPEN

May 18, 2006

Ian Poulter

MAYNOOTH, IRELAND

SCOTT CROCKETT: Ian, many thanks as always for coming in to joining us. We were just chatting about it being a long day. It's actually taken you longer to complete your 18 holes than it took you to travel from The K Club to another country to watch the Champions League Final and then get back to your bed. So tell us your thoughts about a long, but successful day.

IAN POULTER: Bizarre, really. I didn't anticipate spending 12 hours at the golf course today 13 hours, 20 minutes to complete my round of golf. Unbelievable. We were just having a bit of a laugh about it. It was certainly a lot quicker to jump on a plane, go to Paris, watch the game, come back and go to bed. All in all, on a couple of hours sleep, I am more than happy to shoot 1 under par in those conditions. It was very difficult.

SCOTT CROCKETT: Give us your details before we take questions. You started with a bogey. What happened at 10?

IAN POULTER: Drove it in the right hand rough. Couldn't quite make the green. Chipped it, poor chip downwind, went 20 foot by and missed it.

Birdied 11, hit a nice shot in there to about 12 feet and rolled it straight in the middle.

15, nice shot to 12 feet, rolled it in.

Bogeyed 17. I hit a great to about eight or ten feet there, pin high left, pin is tucked in the far back left corner, and it was a left edge putt, wind is off the right and it's pretty strong. So I started fairly straight and it was three feet from the hole. It looked as if it had a chance to go in, gust of wind come up and blew it 25 feet away from the hole off the green and had to get a sand iron out of the bag. So that was kind of frustrating.

Birdied the next. Laid up, hit sand iron from 83 yards to about two inches.

SCOTT CROCKETT: Where were you stopped?

IAN POULTER: I got stopped on the I restarted on the 5th.

SCOTT CROCKETT: Bogeyed 6. What happened there?

IAN POULTER: Hit 5 iron in there on the fringe of the green, left it eight foot short and missed it.

Birdied the short hole, nice 3 iron to 20 feet and rolled it in.

Q. With the conditions, how would you sum up your day?

IAN POULTER: I thought last night the conditions at the match were rough to be honest and I wasn't expecting this today. Yeah, it was as tough as it gets to be honest. I've only played the golf course once in the Pro Am yesterday and I thought that was pretty tricky. And to have 25 mile an hour pretty constant wind all day and it gusted to 40 mile an hour, that was pretty tricky. You know, you can't miss the fairway out here and expect to get it on the green.

So you'll just be hacking it out of the rough, it's so wet and thick, and if you hit it in a fairway bunker, you certainly can't reach some of those greens out there. Second shots are difficult. It's relentless. It's really difficult.

Q. How difficult is it to keep from being frustrated when something like that happens at the 17th?

IAN POULTER: I suppose the second I saw it roll off the green I got a bit frustrated, but I guess it's going to be the same for everybody else out there. There was other people with balls blown off the green, so I wasn't the only one. Suck it up and carry on, I guess. You know, as I said I was off to a good start. I was hitting good golf shots and you know, I hit a good shot to eight feet, it was unfortunate the wind blew the ball off the green. It wasn't anything really I could have controlled; Mother Nature.

Q. Should you have been called off earlier?

IAN POULTER: It was close, as I said, I think the problem was the greens were drying out with the wind and it was a constant wind, and it was, you know, within one or two miles an hour and if you caught a gust at the wrong time and your ball was on the wrong spot on the green, it was going to blow off. Just glad to get it finished.

Q. After what happened with your other playing partners before you stopped, how was the atmosphere when you restarted?

IAN POULTER: Just fine.

End of FastScripts.

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