THE FOUR Irish golfers who are playing in the DP World Tour's Joburg Open will not be partaking in the second round because of the new Covid-19 variant in South Africa called the "NU variant".
Paul Dunne, Jonathan Caldwell, Cormac Sharvin, and Niall Kearney, are part of 15 golfers that have pulled out of the Open, with Caldwell and Dunne still to play due to weather disruptions.
South African sport faced a shutdown on Friday due to the detection of the new variant. Munster's Rugby Championship clash against the Bulls in Pretoria on Saturday looks to be off too
The UK has added South Africa to its red list, there are now six. This comes into effect at 4am on Sunday morning.
Jonathan Caldwell, Paul Dunne, Niall Kearney and Cormac Sharvin all pulled out of the tournament after the UK government introduced restrictions on travellers from South Africa due to Covid #covid19 #joburgopen
https://t.co/OyVTWvBFl2— Irish Golfer (@IrishGolferMag) November 26, 2021
The second round was disrupted by a thunderstorm on Thursday, but play resumed at 6am on Friday at the Randpark Country Club.
Dunne spoke to RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland and revealed that he had finished out his delayed first round today while unaware of the developing situation.
"I’m just not sure that everyone is aware," he said.
"I went to bed early last night and was up early this morning and I didn’t really look at my phone. I’d three holes to finish in my first round and when I came in, I turned my phone on and I had messages from everyone asking me if I was going to go to the airport or stay and play. That’s when I started to look into it.
"I think a few people are on the course without kind of a real idea of what’s going on, but some people are finding it hard, I’ve heard people can’t get a flight until Sunday evening. The only flights available are through Ethiopia and I think with the stuff in Ethiopia [ongoing conflict] nobody fancies travelling through there either. Bit of a minefield at the minute."
Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)Dunne has said that the higher ups have told informed the golfers that the tournament will go on and that no player will be financially punished for pulling
"They just said that they are still confident that the tournament bubbles are a safe place to be.
"The problem they’re going to have is that most of the staff are UK based and you’re supposed to be here three weeks, and I’m assuming the staff aren’t going to want to stay for three weeks because that means they’ll have to quarantine and miss Christmas. So I’m sure there is a lot of internal stuff going on between them.
"We haven’t got an update from them but they’ve just said that if we want to withdraw we could withdraw without fines or without penalties or anything like that."
The event is the first on the schedule of the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour.
Kearney had been best placed of the quartet on one under par while Caldwell was on level par with two holes to play from his first round. Dunne was three over through 15 while Sharvin was seven over par.
