Jon Baker had led the 2020 TEG 13 Trophy since round one, hole two. That is 32 holes across two rounds at Prince's - Dunes / Himalayas, held with the calm of a man who assumed the arrangement was permanent. It ended at the 16th of round two. Gregg Williams had already squared the race at the 15th, then nudged in front with a par at the hardest hole on the course.

Baker's exile lasted two holes. He played both without dropping a gross shot and birdied the 18th, one of the easier finishing holes, to take the lead back outright. One point clear heading into the rest of the tournament. Earlier he had steadied himself with a birdie at the 6th, halting a bogey-double bogey slide before it acquired opinions of its own.

Elsewhere, David Mullin ran up a quadruple bogey at the 9th, which the leaderboard absorbed without comment. But the day belonged to Baker. After round two he led both the Trophy and the Green Jacket, his overnight cushion in the latter having grown to seven.

John Patterson's second round at Prince's opened with a quadruple-bogey 8 and closed with a quadruple-bogey 8. Between those two identical monuments he assembled 28 points and a gross 105.

The trouble arrived on schedule. The quad at the 1st set the tone, and by the 4th he had bled 11 shots in four holes without a single net par to his name. The 5th and 6th steadied him. Holes 7 and 8 brought his best spell of the round, two pars in a row with nothing dropped. A three-hole run from the 10th added 9 points, built on pars at 10 and 12 either side of a bogey at the par-5 11th. For roughly half an hour, John Patterson was playing golf.

Then holes 13 to 15 cost him eight shots, including a triple bogey at the 15th, the hardest hole on the course. The 17th supplied the second 8, arriving like a debt collector who had always known the address. He remains anchored at the foot of the 2020 Wooden Spoon table, where the furniture has begun to take his shape.

At Prince's Golf Club's Dunes/Himalayas course on Friday, Alex Baker's second round lurched about for a while and then simply stopped working. He parred the 3rd, bogeyed the 4th and 5th, and took 9 stableford points from that stretch. From the 10th to the 12th he gave back 7 shots, a triple bogey and two doubles.

The finish was something else. Five consecutive double bogeys from the 14th through the 18th, ten gross shots dropped in ten holes' worth of golf compressed into five. It began with a double on the par-3 14th, one of the easier holes out there. It included another on the par-5 15th, Prince's hardest hole by stroke index. Two more followed at the 17th and 18th. Five doubles in a row is not a collapse. It is a rhythm. It left his gross for the day at 99, the only figure recorded for him at the course so far this TEG.