Australian duo James Marchesani and Daniel Gale are among a group of players one shot off the lead on a bunched leaderboard after day one of the inaugural Japan-Australasia Championship in Auckland.<\/p>\n
Japan’s Yoshinori Fujimoto birdied the final hole on Thursday to card a six-under 66 and break a deadlock at the top.<\/p>\n
Marchesani had an eagle, five birdies and two bogeys in his opening round of five-under 67 at the revamped Royal Auckland and Grange GC.<\/p>\n
That score was matched by countryman Gale, New Zealand’s DP World Tour regular Kazuma Kobori and Japanese duo Aguri Iwasaki and Taichi Nabetani.<\/p>\n
With a prize pool of $A1.2 million, the new co-sanctioned tournament is the fourth biggest on the Australasian Tour and will go a long way to deciding the 2025-26 Order of Merit.<\/p>\n
If the winner is a member of the Australasian PGA Tour, they will pick up a large number of points and shoot right up the OOM rankings with only two smaller events still to play.<\/p>\n
Fujimoto, a two-time winner on the Japan Golf Tour, set a new composite course record after draining the birdie putt on 18 to sign for a 66 late in the day.<\/p>\n
Marchesani is currently third on the OOM, behind only countrymen Cameron John and Chris Wood.<\/p>\n
All three missed the cut at last week’s NZ Open, with Marchesani the big mover on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty important obviously to play well given what’s on the line,” Marchesani said.<\/p>\n
“I’ve still got a little bit of work to do to catch up, but with the points on offer it’s not all that far away.<\/p>\n
“Obviously given the standings it obviously helped that they didn’t get any further ahead [last week].<\/p>\n
“I’m pretty friendly with both of the boys, so you don’t want to death ride them, but it is a nice feeling when they’re not getting further ahead.”<\/p>\n
The highlight of Gale’s round came at the par-4 3rd hole, where he holed out for eagle from the greenside bunker.<\/p>\n
Kobori won the Australasian Tour OOM title two years ago, catapulting him onto the DP World Tour.<\/p>\n
He was always keen to return home to play last weekend’s NZ Open at Millbrook Resort and this new event.<\/p>\n
“We had a lot of people out there today, so it’s nice to play in front of them and then give them something that they came to watch,” the 24-year-old said.<\/p>\n
“Putting on a good performance for them, that’s all that matters here.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian duo James Marchesani and Daniel Gale are among a group of players one shot off the lead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-520159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}