Gregg Williams won the TEG 8 Trophy, and he won it properly. His 41 points at Oitavos Dunes were the best round of the day, turning a five-point overnight lead into a twelve-point margin. That is not a nervous finish. That is a man closing a door.

It was not, however, a clean round. Holes 5 to 8 cost him 11 gross shots. It began with a quadruple bogey at the 5th, the hardest hole on the course, and continued with two double bogeys and a triple. Four holes, five stableford points, and an air of magnificent unconcern. He appeared to regard the stretch as somebody else's problem. The leaderboard, to his credit, agreed with him.

He then steadied and did the necessary thing. Twelve points from holes 12 to 15, built on pars either side of a single bogey at the par-5 13th. That sealed it, on the same afternoon David Mullin took the Green Jacket lead off Jon Baker. Williams had shot 29 in Round 3. He had never seen Oitavos Dunes before this round. He produced the one that mattered. In this company, that counts as mastery.

Henry Meller's fourth round at Oitavos Dunes collapsed before it had properly started. The double bogey at the 1st was the gentlest thing that happened to him all morning. Then came a quadruple bogey at the 2nd and a triple at the 3rd. Then a sextuple-bogey 10 at the 4th. Then, without pause, a quintuple-bogey 9 at the 5th, stroke index 1, the hardest hole on the course. A second double bogey at the 6th closed the sequence.

Twenty-two gross shots shipped in six holes. Not one net par among them. He had six holes to find a single point of shelter and found none.

There was a truce in the middle, two pars in a row at the 14th and 15th, a brief interval in which golf resembled golf. The finish then rhymed with the start. Holes 16 to 18 cost him nine more shots, including a quadruple bogey at the 18th, the second-hardest hole out there. His third round had been genuinely strong. His score fell by 13 stableford points in a day. The opening six and the closing three stand as bookends to a round nobody would choose to keep.

Stuart Neumann signed off at Oitavos Dunes with 32 points. That is 12 better than his third-round 20 and comfortably his best of the trip. It arrived precisely one day after it could have done him any good.

The Wooden Spoon had already been allocated, and he was the recipient. The gap to the next-worst player did narrow, from 22 points to 11, which is the sort of progress that gets noted politely and then filed away. He remained 11 points adrift at the close. The revival was real. The timing was not.

The round showed what he had available all along. He played the 11th and 12th without dropping a shot. Either side of that, the familiar trouble: a quadruple bogey at the 5th, the hardest hole on the course, and another at the 17th. Eight strokes gone, nothing returned. Remove those two holes and this is one of the best rounds of his tournament. He did not remove them. That has rather been the theme.