On a beautiful Saturday on 6 September 2013, a small group of golfers gathered on the windswept fairways of Kinross with little idea that they were founding the most distinctive amateur golf circuit in Scotland. They were friends first, competitors second, but competitors of a particular kind: men who wanted structure, meaning, legacy, and, perhaps more than anything, a record of who had actually won the bragging rights each year.

It was on that day that the EuroDov Tour was born.

The 2026 EuroDov Tour season presents something the modern era has never seen: an expanded 18-man field, the end of Q-School, new venues, shifting handicaps, returning players, rookies with swagger, wounded champions, rising threats, and a defending titleholder carrying the weight of expectation.

The battle for the James Braid Quaich will not be fought on ability alone — but on resilience, consistency, scoring windows, mental fortitude, travel, wind, and the brutal mathematics of handicap pressure.

Craig Miller arrives on the 2026 EuroDov Tour carrying two unique badges: The final-ever Q-School winner, and A rookie with a trophy already in hand.

Most players enter the Order of Merit through years of grinding, through near misses, through heartbreak, through incremental progress.

Miller did it the blunt way.

He showed up. He won. And he walked through the door.

In professional sport, absences create mythology. When a player disappears from competition — when they fall off the ranking sheets — when their name vanishes from the scoreboards — stories start to form.

People begin to ask: “What happened to him?” or “Is he coming back?” and “Will he ever be the same?”

For two full seasons, Graeme Connor was exactly that: a missing piece of the EuroDov Tour puzzle.

Every generation of the EuroDov Tour introduces a character the field doesn’t quite know what to do with.

Not a returning champion. Not a consistent mid-table competitor. Not a dynasty name. Not a bomber or a technician.

But a new entrant.

Golf careers are not linear, they do not march upward forever, They don’t follow predictable graphs of progression.

They are waves. Some rise spectacularly, others flatten, and some crash unexpectedly.

Stuart Sutherland’s 2025 season was a crash — not a catastrophic one, not a career-defining one,
but one that sent a clear message: momentum is not guaranteed.

There are golfers who finesse. There are golfers who shape shots. There are golfers who study the geometry of the course.

And then there is Stuart Allan, who sometimes looks like he intends not just to play the course — but to bully it into submission.

He is one of the Tour’s purest athletes.

In every long-running sporting narrative, there are players who reinvent themselves — not through drama or breakthrough, but through steady, disciplined evolution.

From 2021 to 2023, Stevie Orr was almost a textbook mid-to-lower table golfer. Averages around 11th. Struggles to crack top-5. Occasional bright spots lost inside waves of middle finishes.

And then something changed. Maybe it was: a swing tweak, a mindset shift, a belief adjustment, or simply maturity. But between 2023 and 2024, Stevie Orr went from “also competing” to consistently relevant.

Some golfers inspire respect. Some inspire admiration. But Scott Gowens inspires fear.

Not fear because of intimidation, or personality, or psychological gamesmanship…

No — fear because of how low he can go. He is the only golfer on Tour with the capability to produce a round that makes everyone else shake their head in disbelief — the kind of number that breaks the spreadsheet.

There are flamboyant golfers. There are emotional golfers. There are powerful golfers. There are streaky golfers.

And then there is Richard Mair — the ultimate rhythm golfer.

He is not loud. He is not theatrical. He is not volatile. He is not erratic.

He is inevitable.

For half a decade, the Order of Merit had a fixed center of gravity: McColgan. Players measured themselves against him. They admired him. They feared him. They chased him. They failed to catch him.

Then came 2025.

And suddenly, the Tour learned a new name for inevitability: Paul Gowens — Champion Golfer of the Year. His season was not a fluke. It was not luck. It was not opportunistic. It was domination.

For years, Kevin Brannan was one of the Tour’s paradoxes. He had multiple Major victories, a proven ability to perform in pressure situations — yet for all that, he somehow never managed to win a regular Order of Merit event.

It became a strange statistical glitch. A running joke. A storyline repeated in hushed tones: “Brannan wins the big ones, but never the small ones.”

Golf is not just about hitting balls. It’s about resilience, and about the will to keep showing up. And in 2025, there was no greater embodiment of that spirit than Jim Robertson.

Returning from ill health, body not quite 100%, stamina uncertain, rhythm untested…Robertson still turned out in every event, refusing to let absence become identity. He appeared not as a man afraid of slipping away from the Tour — but as someone determined to stay present within it.

Greig Baxter is the Tour’s phantom. He’s not always there — but when he does appear, he has a habit of disrupting the ecosystem.

He’s like a guest star in a TV series — you forget he’s in the cast — then suddenly he turns up and steals the scene.

Golf is a game of solitude played in public. No one can hit your shots for you. No one can save you from your own nerves.

But Denis Duncan has carried something extra that no other golfer has endured: Comparison.

There are seasons in the life of the EuroDov Tour that feel like continuation — familiar courses, familiar patterns, familiar rhythms of expectation. And then there are seasons like 2026. Seasons that feel like a hinge, a turning of the axis, where the map of possibility expands.

For years, the EuroDov Tour operated under a quiet, unspoken assumption: If you want to win the Order of Merit, you have to go through McColgan.

He wasn’t just a top player — he was the gravitational centre of the Tour.

Then came the disaster of 2025 — or rather — the disaster of one day in 2025: Tour Championships — 12th

His worst finish at Craigielaw…by a galaxy saw his OoM title collapse from his hands. He went from leading the season — to finishing 3rd overall. And suddenly, the invincible competitor looked… mortal.

There are golfers whose careers feel like unfolding puzzles — uncertain trajectories, erratic paths.

Daniel Peck is not one of them. Peck’s story is a slope, a steady incline, a tightening spiral toward one unavoidable point: He is going to win an Order of Merit event.

Some players carry reputation. Some carry swagger. Callum McNeill carries expectation.

Few golfers on Tour evoke as much frustrated admiration as McNeill — the man whose game suggests he should have multiple Order of Merit wins… but who, somehow, has never sealed the deal

Four EuroDov favourites stand on the infamous 17th tee of the Eden Course — Denis Duncan, Barry Cunningham, Scott Gowens, and Ally Greenshields — each carrying memories of heartbreak, hilarity, and high scores. With smiles, nerves, and shared trauma, the caricature captures the camaraderie and comedy of four men facing the most feared tee shot in EuroDov folklore.

Ever watched someone on the EuroDov Tour stripe a drive, chunk a wedge, melt down over a three-putt, or casually win another trophy — and thought:

“Who does this guy REMIND me of?”

Well, we’ve finally answered the question nobody asked but everyone secretly wanted to know.

Talk to enough EuroDov spectators and you’ll hear the same line about Ally Greenshields: “He’s boom or bust. He’ll either be 2nd or 15th.” It’s the shorthand, the stereotype, the myth.

But the numbers tell another story entirely. Ally isn’t chaos. He’s consistency — just not the kind that writes headlines or wins trophies.

Alan Duncan arrived on the EuroDov Tour with the bearing of an elder statesman: thoughtful, affable, steady — the kind of golfer you expect to shake your hand firmly on the first tee and serenely on the last. But beneath that calm exterior lies something volatile: a streak of competitive fire that can either propel him to victory or burn holes through his scorecard.

In 2026, the EuroDov Tour enters its most transformative season in over a decade. Gone is Q-School — the brutal and beloved proving ground that decided a golfer’s fate. Gone is the scramble for relevance and survival. Gone is the relegation mechanism that once loomed like a guillotine over the lower ranks of the Order of Merit.

When Paul Gowens walks into the team room for the 2026 Carnegie Cup, he’ll do so as both leader and competitor. The two-time Major champion and four-time Order of Merit winner has never lost a Carnegie Cup point — a perfect six out of six across his two appearances. But this year, his responsibilities go beyond his own ball-striking and putting stroke.

As captain, Gowens must select eight players to join the four automatic picks — himself, his son Scott, the ever-consistent David McColgan, and the gritty Matchplay champion Denis Duncan. On those decisions will rest not only the balance of his team, but perhaps the destiny of the Cup itself.

The question is: what matters more — current Tour rankings, Cup pedigree, or career-long winning pedigree?

The RyDov Cup has never been just another line on the EuroDov calendar. Since its chaotic birth in 2013, it has grown into a proving ground, a crucible where reputations are built, partnerships forged, and legacies secured. Every putt matters, every pairing becomes a story, and every player leaves behind a statistical footprint.

The 2025 RyDov Cup will long be remembered for its drama, its subplots, and ultimately for Team Gowens’ dominant afternoon surge to secure the trophy. But for Stuart Allan, captain of Team Allan, it will also be remembered as a personal chapter of pride, frustration, and finality. In his own words, Allan has offered a candid reflection on what it meant to lead — and lose — on one of the EuroDov Tour’s most storied stages.

There are few tournaments in golf — even on the EuroDov Tour — that carry the mystique, pressure, and drama of the RyDov Cup. Since its birth in 2013, the event has grown from a dozen players experimenting with matchplay into the Tour’s traditional showpiece, the season’s climactic exclamation point.

For Paul Gowens, the RyDov Cup has always been personal. As both a player and a leader, his name has been etched into the history of the competition, but 2025 elevated him again. By guiding his side to a commanding 15–9 win over Stuart Allan’s men at Kinross, Gowens cemented his place among the great captains of RyDov folklore.

There are dates and places in golf that acquire an almost mythical quality. For the EuroDov Tour, the RyDov Cup has become one of those hallowed markers of the season, a closing chapter that is as much about legacy as it is about scorecards. The 2025 edition promised to add another layer to its folklore.