Golf Betting: Kaymer ready to return to the big time

Is Martin Kaymer about to hit top form?
Ralph Ellis explains how Martin Kaymer's final putt at the Ryder Cup wasn't greeted with huge excitement in his homeland, and why the German might be about to return to his very best form...
Some 46 years on, Kenneth Wolstenholme is arguably now as giant a legend of the 1966 World Cup final as England's hat-trick hero Sir Geoff Hurst.
"They think it's all over - it is now" has evolved into a catchphrase that we all know and understand. Some years ago I got given a video of ITV's coverage of that famous day, and when it got to England's fourth goal cringed as the best poor Hugh Johns could blurt out was: "Here's Hurst, he might make it three . . .he has, he has."
The thought resonated as I heard Martin Kaymer describing how German TV dealt with his six foot putt to make sure Europe retained the Ryder Cup.
You might have thought they'd have approached the moment with thoughts of Bernard Langer's miss from about the same distance at Kiawah Island 21 years earlier. You'd have imagined they'd have talked through the desperate nerves their man must have been facing after running his previous effort so far past the hole; that they'd have built the tension - and then exuberantly celebrated his success.
But no. According to Kaymer: "There was no excitement. It was 'they're on the 18th green now, it's a very important putt for him and oh yeah, it drops in. Very nice.' They are just so flat. This was a big moment not just for me but for golf in Germany. Some people just don't get it."
Kaymer's fall from the summit of the game has been one of the big surprises of the last year. It is only 20 months ago that he took over as the world's number one, but clearly at the age of 27 it was too much for him. He spent eight weeks at the summit, and his decline since has seen him spin down to a current position of 33.
There are signs, however, that if the TV commentators in his homeland didn't understand the significance of the cool way he holed that Ryder Cup putt, Kaymer himself did. And it might just have put some confidence back into his game that will have him climbing back up the rankings.
I know that tied 34th in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship last week hardly suggests a dramatic or instant improvement, but his score of nine under came from four consistent rounds of golf which got better each day. My spies in Scotland tell me he was striking the ball superbly, and playing in the Pro-Am with his manager and friend Johan Elliot looked relaxed and free from some of the stress which seems to have troubled his game in the last year.
All that makes Kaymer stand out as the big value bet at 20.019/1 for the Portugal Masters. Along with Luke Donald and Steve Stricker he turned down his invitation for the mega money Turkish Airlines World Golf final, choosing instead to stay on the European Tour this week.
In the early markets the German is 5.69/2 for a Top Five Finish, and 2.915/8 to make it into the Top 10.
To borrow the famous 1966 commentary, there might have been those who thought in the last few months that Kaymer's time at the very peak of world golf was all over. After the Ryder Cup, it isn't now.