Record number of Englishmen in this year’s Masters field

The Masters Club dinner on Tuesday featured a traditional Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding, courtesy of reigning champion Danny Willett, and the chances have never been better that next year’s menu might include a Lancashire hotpot, ploughman’s lunch or jellied eels.

A record 11 English golfers will tee it up in this year’s Masters Tournament, and none of them is named Nick Faldo, Luke Donald or Ian Poulter. It’s the most Augusta entries from any nation other than the U.S. in tournament history.

“Eleven in the Masters and there are fewer than 100 who have qualified?” two-time Masters runner-up Lee Westwood said last week after Tommy Fleetwood and Ross Fisher were added to the ranks as top-50 qualifiers. “That’s an incredible achievement and should be shouted about from the rooftops. Yet, strangely, it isn’t.”

In 2001, Westwood was the only Englishman ranked among the top 100 in the world. Currently there are 10 English golfers ranked in the top 60 – all of them in the Masters field, in addition to British Amateur champion Scott Gregory.

The best of the lot include the Nos. 14-17 players – Justin Rose, Tyrrell Hatton, Paul Casey and Willett. Matthew Fitzpatrick (No. 31), Fleetwood (32), Fisher (45), Westwood (54), Andy Sullivan (58) and Chris Wood (60) round out the English pros in the field.

“I think golf in England is in great hands at the moment,” Willett said.

Westwood – who at 43 called himself “the daddy of them all” – said the state of English golf has never been healthier and should get more credit back home.

“This decade alone, England has had two world No. 1s, at least half a dozen top-10 players and two major winners,” Westwood said in Houston. “At the Masters last year, we had first and second in Danny and myself. Tell me, which top-class sport is England better in than golf?

“And look at all the youngsters coming through. We have Danny, of course, and then there are the likes of Hatton, Fitzpatrick, Wood, Sullivan, Fleetwood … the list goes on. It is nice to be almost 44 and to still be up there, competing alongside them.”

Hatton and Fleetwood are among the hot prospects to potentially make some noise in their first Masters starts. Hatton, 25, soared up the world rankings since winning the Dunhill Links in October, posting top-10 finishes in seven of his 11 starts since, including fourth-place finishes at PGA National and Bay Hill and a 10th at the WGC in Mexico City.

Fleetwood, 26, started the year with a win in Abu Dhabi and a runner-up to Dustin Johnson in Mexico City. Rose, who won the 2013 U.S. Open and captured the gold medal in golf’s return to the Olympics last year, remains the most heralded English player with a strong career record at Augusta.

“It ebbs and flows, and everybody remembers when I think Lee was the only person in the top 50 or top 100 in the world at one point, and now you’ve got 11 guys in the Masters,” Fleetwood said. “It’s brilliant for English golf. It shows how strong the players are.”

Last year, when Willett became the first English winner of the green jacket since Faldo in 1996, the Cross of St. George littered the leaderboard with Westwood finishing second, Casey fourth, Matthew Fitzpatrick seventh and Rose 10th. It matched the U.S. with five players in the top 10 and ties.

Casey said Willett’s victory might provoke an outbreak of English winners in much the same way that Seve Ballesteros’ Masters win in 1980 inspired a wave of European success at Augusta over the next two decades.

“It seemed so attainable in that great era of Europeans in the ’80s and ’90s passing green jackets to each other that obviously sparked something,” Casey said. “Hopefully the Danny Willett victory will spark more to come in the next 15 years.”

Willett agrees.

“I don’t think it will be long before you see the guys starting to step it up again in major championships,” he said of his English brethren.