A second successive day of extreme high winds forced the DP World Tour Q-School First Stage qualifier at Austria’s Schloss Ebreichsdorf to be reduced to the 36 holes already played, leaving all four Irish on the outside looking in.
With 22 to qualify, Alex Maguire, James Sugrue and Paul Conroy were all within touching distance as they occupied a tie for 28th place on -2, and amateur Stephen Grant on +1 still had a chance.
Maguire had opened with a two-under 70 and followed up with a level-par 72, while Conroy had gone 69-73, Sugrue 72-70 and Grant 71-74, but now it’s the end of the road as far as their Q-School ambitions are concerned.
All four had battled hard for two rounds to first make the cut and to put themselves in position to attack over the final two rounds, so to say it’s a stroke of misfortune would be an understatement.
Unfortunately, as the qualification spots were granted to the top 22, there is no backdoor offering into one of the remaining qualifiers so they will have to look elsewhere for their playing schedules in 2025.
Spanish amateur Pablo Alperi Lopez was the leading qualifier with an extremely impressive 12-under tally after back-to-back 66s, two shots clear of the chasing trio of Swiss Nicola Gerhardsen, German Anton Albers and American Kaylor Steger.