By Kent Gray
Justin Rose is on a roll, the hottest in golf. After 10 top-10s to end 2017, including wins at the Indonesian Masters, WGC-HSBC Championship and Turkish Airlines Open, you’re not alone in wondering how he could possibly keep the streak going?

The world No.6 reckons he’s got the formula just about right.

“I think it’s really important to miss the game,” said the 37-year-old Englishman who downed clubs for roughly half of his near six weeks off over Christmas. “I kind of like to have that itch to play again, then I know it’s time to go.”

The itch will be scratched when Rose tees it up in a mouth-watering Rio Olympics medal winning threesome with Henrik Stenson and Matt Kuchar in the first round of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at 7.30am (10th tee) on Thursday.

His ball-striking, following a minor adjustment when he missed the cut at the U.S. PGA Championship, is so flush you wouldn’t bet against Rose adding the Falcon trophy to his overflowing mantelpiece and certainly not against another top-10.

But he’s looking longer term.

“I’m excited. I’m really enjoying my golf [but] I’m looking at it very long term. I’m looking at five years, really of what I can really achieve in the next five.

“So the level of excitement in terms of this year is not heightened because of what’s just happened. I think that what just happened in the last sort of six months or so has been due to my long-term approach and being excited about, you know, where I feel I can go and get with my game.

“I still think there’s areas of improvement that can be made as I go through the season so I’m still sort of in the journey. I still feel like I’m still ticking boxes every single week of getting better.”

So do you think the game benefits from having that one dominant figure or is it just as good when there’s been quite a few guys jousting back and forth for the big titles?

“I think people love to see history being made, history being broken. So obviously that takes a dominant figure to do that,” said Rose.

“I think that Tiger was so dominant for a while, we don’t appreciate how dominant some of these other players have been recently. I think there’s a lot of dominance on Tour. I think the top five or six guys in the world have really separated themselves from the rest, and I think that there’s a form of dominance at the top but it’s spread a little bit more evenly than just one guy but.

“I think the one guy we all know we’re talking about [Woods] could make things incredibly interesting where you have the best of both worlds, someone coming back with history, trying to create even more history and legacy, and yet there’s so much more parity and more interest because there’s more story lines rather than just one.

“Hopefully we can find, with the Tiger comeback and obviously with the young guys playing really well, and a couple of us old guys trying to make it a bit more interesting for the young guys, there could be a lot more story lines this year.”