Aug 23, 2025, 06:04 PM ET<\/p>\n
BIRMINGHAM, England — Matt Fitzpatrick<\/a> will head into Sunday’s final round of the British Masters with a one-stroke lead after posting a 4-under 68 on Saturday and boosting his hopes of becoming one of captain Luke Donald’s picks for the Ryder Cup.<\/p>\n The 30-year-old Englishman carded four birdies and two bogeys, while a brilliant eagle at the 15th left him 12 under after three rounds.<\/p>\n Fitzpatrick holds a slender lead over Sweden’s Alex Noren<\/a> (65) in second. Marco Penge<\/a> shot a course record-tying 63 that lifted him into a tie for third. Penge had nine birdies to sit two shots adrift of Fitzpatrick.<\/p>\n Rasmus Hojgaard<\/a> (69) is tied for 14th and needs to finish in a two-way tie for 29th or better in the tournament being held at The Belfry to earn enough points to overtake Shane Lowry<\/a>, who is clinging onto sixth place in the list of automatic qualifiers in Europe’s team.<\/p>\n The top six get into the European team automatically. Rory McIlroy<\/a>, Justin Rose<\/a>, Tommy Fleetwood<\/a>, Robert MacIntyre<\/a> and Tyrrell Hatton<\/a> are already guaranteed to be at next month’s matches at Bethpage Black.<\/p>\n Lowry is not competing in the British Masters, the final event in qualifying, so cannot pick up any more Ryder Cup points. He’s taking part in the PGA Tour’s season-ending Tour Championship instead.<\/p>\n Donald will announce his six captain’s picks to complete the 12-man team on Sept. 1.<\/p>\n Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug 23, 2025, 06:04 PM ET BIRMINGHAM, England — Matt Fitzpatrick will head into Sunday’s final round of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-93573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}