Harrington refuses to be licked

Padraig Harrington admits he went nuts over the winter and changed his TONGUE position.

Now all the Dubliner has to do is lick his game into shape to avoid dropping out of the world’s top 100.

The triple major winner fell to 93rd in the world this week and must bite the bullet and finish in the top-two at this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am to qualify for the WGC-Accenture Match Play in Arizona.

Explaining his latest eccentric change in an interview with Gary Murphy on Setanta Ireland last Saturday night, Harrington said: “When I’ve had six weeks off and I start practising, I go nuts. I start pulling everything apart and looking at every little nuance.

“I’ll tell you how bad it is – I changed the position of my tongue in my mouth.

“To relax my jaw, I put the tongue at the top of my mouth. I used to bite it.”

Wherever Harrington puts his tongue this week, he needs to taste success quickly again and move into the world’s top 64 [available players] on Sunday night to avoid missing the Accenture Match Play for the first time in his career.

But he also knows that if he misses the cut at Pebble Beach he could fall outside the world’s top 100 for the first time since August 1999.

The six-time Ryder Cup star needed to make a fast start to the season to keep alive his chances of making it to Tucson.

But his putting was poor and he fell away over the weekend in both the Volvo Golf Champions and the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship.

Yet he refuses to throw in the towel and reckons the work he’s done with new practice coach Dave Alred will pay off soon.

Harrington said: “All in all I am very happy with what I saw in my game for the last two weeks – from tee to green I played well and it was actually my putting that let me down.

“The changes I made with Dave will have a huge effect for the rest of the year.

“I left Abu Dhabi as excited as I have been for a long, long time.”