It’s a demanding old world isn’t it? There was a time when you could go away for a break, return home with a slightly sunburnt neck and a modest anecdote about ordering that thing in the harbour-side bistro that you mistakenly thought was one thing but ended up being the other thing and folk were quite happy to listen to your run-of-the-mill recollections.

These days, thanks to those overwhelmingly smug ‘1000 Places You Must Visit Before You Die’ publications, nobody is interested in your hum-drum holiday haverings unless you’ve spent a week of remote, spiritual enlightenment with the Huli Wigmen of Papua New Guinea or performed tribal face paintings with the Kuna Indians of Panama before watching the sun go down on a cliff edge while sipping some purifying elixir from the hollowed out skull of a bison. Sod that. Give me a static caravan at Seton Sands any day.

In the world of golf, meanwhile, the global travellers descend on Abu Dhabi this week for a money-spinning showdown that will see Jordan Spieth, the world No 1, square up to Rory McIlroy, the world No 3, for the first time this season. It promises to be another year of the young guns but there’s one youthful slinger teeing up who has been firing blanks for far too long. At just 22, Matteo Manassero, the hugely talented Italian, has four European Tour titles to his name. A couple of years ago, those in the golfy scene were justifiably predicting that he would be part of this exciting vanguard on the global stage. In this unpredictable game, of course, predictions tend to be a fool’s errand. From the fringes of the top 20 on the world rankings not so long ago, Manassero is now languishing at No 666. The number of the beast? Well, wee Matteo’s golf has certainly been bedevilled over the last few torrid months. Those of us who were fortunate to watch him win the Amateur Championship at Formby as a 16-year-old in 2009 had a sizeable inkling that we were glimpsing something very special and he didn’t disappoint as he went on to become the youngest winner on the European Tour at 17 when landed the Castello Masters in 2010. In 2013 he became the youngest ever BMW PGA Championship winner but since then he’s been on the kind of hair-raising plummet you’d get if you followed that aforementioned 1000 thingymebobs book and went base jumping into the ruddy Cave of Swallows in Mexico. He’s missed 14 cuts on the trot going back to last summer’s Irish Open and he finds himself at something of a cross roads. In this crash, bang, wallop era, where stretched championship courses have tees and greens in different postcodes, Manassero’s search for length and more power has had an adverse impact. With an average dunt off the tee of around 273 yards, Manassero is not one of the game’s biggest hitters – McIlroy averaged 304 yards on the PGA Tour last year – but the technical tweaks and tinkerings that he has performed on his swing to find that extra something is providing more pain than gain.

Like his fellow 22-year-old Spieth, Manassero should be fearless on the greens but the focus on length has led to his putting stats declining. His average of 30.8 putts per round last season saw him down in 203rd on that particular league table. In 2013, the year of his biggest triumph at Wentworth, he was 21st with 29.1 putts per round. In this game of small margins, the knock-on effects can be huge.

Given his tender years, and his abundant talents, Manassero has plenty of time on his side and a Ryder Cup in his home country of Italy in 2022 will fuel those desires to get back into the upper echelons again. In this unforgiving, fickle game of rapidly rising stars, though, it doesn’t take long to become a forgotten man.

AND ANOTHER THING

In a global game of increasing strength at all levels, Connor Syme’s terrific win in the Australian Amateur Championship deserves considerable praise. There’s no rush for him to turn pro, of course, but events on the main European Tour continued to be eye opening. Haydn Porteous won the Joburg Open, just a week after Brandon Stone won the BMW SA Open. Both South African youngsters were playing against – and losing to – some of Scotland’s leading amateurs not so long ago while Sunday’s Joburg runner-up, Zander Lombard, was beaten by Blairgowrie’s Bradley Neil in the final of the Amateur Championship in 2014. Since turning pro in June last year, Neil has made just one cut in 12 European Tour and Challenge Tour events and, like many Scots before him, has toiled with the transition. The boys from the Rainbow Nation, meanwhile, are finding the pots of gold.