For the first time, I played Inniscrone yesterday.
I came away with mixed feelings. To me, the golf course is very disjointed and doesn't really "come together" until the 11th.
A superb opener is followed by a decent 2nd. However, the walk from first green to second tee is the first of several interesting compromises and decisions made in the routing that are leaving me scratching my head. As Ran points out, the 2nd hole is elegant in strategy and presentation. However, I am left to wonder if a better hole may have lurked if the tee were closer to the first green.
This attitude is further compounded by the superb nature of the 3rd hole, where the walk from the 2nd green to the 3rd tee across the road was very much worth the separation. I have always been fond of segregated portions of a site being fully exploited for the purposes of golf, and the stretch from 3 to 7 fits my ideal nicely.
This brings us to the fifth, which Ran describes in the course review:
No description of Inniscrone can be complete without making reference to the controversial 5th, a 105-yard drop-shot hole to a wide but quite shallow green that runs away in spots and leads to a ten-foot drop behind the green. Its detractors point to the fact that it is all too possible for a crisply-struck pitch to land on the downslope on the front center part of the green and finish in the deep bunker beyond the green, leading to a score of 5 in many cases. However, it is interesting to hear a table full of golfers describe their strategies for the hole some will deliberately play toward the front bunker and take their chances getting up and down, many will just play to the deeper and flatter right third of the green, while others have enough confidence in their accuracy and distance-control that they will go after the hole no matter where it is. To the authors, any hole that can generate such debate as to the best way to play it can't be but so bad. Toss in the fact that the shot is only with a lob wedge or a small sand iron, and there just isn't cause for calls of unfairness.
After some reflection, I feel the hole does not justify the compromises made in the routing to make it fit the property. For those who are unfamiliar, the 5th tee and 6th are adjacent to each other, which the fifth playing away from the sixth. As Ran describes, the green is a short drop shot proposition to a green sloping away.
While there is strategy to playing the hole, as noted, the strategy is more in line with how a golfer deals with a less-than-ideal shot than how the golfer determines the best chance to score. The hole essentially sets up as though one is short-sided on the wrong side of a green - no matter the hole location. While the bunkers have been removed, little in the way of flexibility exists. For me, the ideal fix would be to extend the putting surface into the area that was once bunkers, allowing for semi-blind hole locations in the front portion of the green and the chance for a wily golfer to tempt the blind portion of the green to get to the area of the present putting surface.
Perhaps I am missing something, but Ran notes that the short drop shot par 3 is lacking in the game today. I don't particularly buy this argument, nor do I forgive neglecting the chance to build a hole that truly is rare - the short, very uphill par 3 - which this site could offer without the routing interruption given in the present configuration. While the hole taken individually may be reasonable, in context of the previous and following holes the fifth hole is a missed opportunity.
For the cognoscenti, which profiles of Ran's do you not find in line with your own thinking?