Jon Baker's Prince's Shore/Dunes round returned 28 points, the worst Trophy score of the day. At the bottom of the 2021 Wooden Spoon table, a tight contest became a formality.

The cruelty is that he had the raw materials. He parred the 8th and 9th. Later he put together three straight pars from the 14th to the 16th. Between those two stretches of genuine golf sat a quadruple-bogey 8 at the par-4 13th, the hardest hole on the course. The pars were bookends. The 13th was the hole in the shelf. The run to the 16th was then snapped by a triple bogey at the 17th, which felt less like a setback than a scheduled appointment.

The margin between Baker and the next-worst player went from two points to thirteen. That is not slipping. That is leaving.

At the top, Mullin's leads survived. He remains clear in the Trophy, his advantage narrowed slightly to eight points, and in the Green Jacket, where the twelve-point cushion was not touched at all. Three men spent the day at Prince's trying to move him. One of them took a 9 and moved himself.

David Mullin's third round at Prince's summed to 36 points. The shape of it was less tidy than the total suggests. At the par-5 8th he ran up a quadruple-bogey 9 and returned nothing for it. On most cards that is the hole that decides the afternoon.

Instead he finished as though the 8th had happened to somebody else. Thirteen points over the last four holes. Pars at the 15th, 16th and 17th, then a birdie at the 18th. Four holes without dropping a single gross shot. It was an unbroken performance of competence, staged directly downstream of a 9.

He ended the day leading both the Trophy and the Green Jacket. The Trophy lead was trimmed slightly to eight points. The Jacket advantage held at 12. It was also his second visit to Prince's, matching his prior best gross of 92. The closing stretch did exactly the damage limitation required, which is a polite way of saying he got away with it.

Alex Baker's third round at Prince's Shore/Dunes began in the manner of a controlled demolition. Double bogeys at each of the first three holes. Six shots gone in six holes, for a return of four points. A quadruple-bogey 8 at the 10th, one of the harder holes on the course, suggested the structure was still coming down.

Then he simply stopped. Back-to-back pars at the 11th and 12th steadied him, and he gathered enough elsewhere to card 37 points. That left him one point off the day's best score of 39 in a four-man field. The finish was still eight shots worse than his prior visit to the course, a detail he is under no obligation to mention again.

Nothing moved at the top. David Mullin held both the Trophy and the Green Jacket, with the Trophy gap narrowed slightly to eight. Baker's round disturbed none of it. It was resilience without consequence, which is its own kind of achievement.