While he wasn’t able to chase down the winner in last week’s Sunshine Tour event, Daniel van Tonder will be happy with the state of his game as he begins his 2025-26 campaign on the Sunshine Tour at Benoni Country Club today.

Van Tonder, who cruised to victory in last season’s Order of Merit delivered by the Courier Guy, finished four strokes behind the seemingly unstoppable Kieran Vincent in the Waterfall city Tournament of Champions at Royal Johannesburg. But he displayed his characteristic adventurousness, aggression, and brilliance, and with his year to date unfolding with lots to be pleased about, he is probably the outright favourite to take the title in the Gary & Vivienne Player Challenge.

He was in a relaxed mood in the pro-am preceding the tournament, and he returns to a course where he had many good moments as a younger player. With that mood added to his usual armoury, he is quite likely to produce long passages of play which are essentially irresistible.

Like Vincent was last week, Mexico’s Luis Carrera has also seemed irresistible in the first two Sunshine Tour tournaments of the new season. He won the FBC Zimbabwe Open and the KitKat Cash & Carry Pro-Am easily, but he came down to earth during the Tournament of Champions. Perhaps the bump he took during that descent will make him seem irresistible again.

The field for Benoni Country Club just feels loaded for a 54-hole Sunshine Tour event: George Coetzee, Jonathan Broomhead, Pieter Moolman, Yurav Premlall and Jean Hugo are all Sunshine Tour winners and capable of blitzing strong fields. And players like Keenan Davidse, Martin Vorster and Nikhil Rama all in search of maiden Sunshine Tour wins, it could be a fascinating battle.

But Van Tonder can make all of these musings academic with a couple of trademark bursts of birdies that can spreadeagle the opposition. He seems primed to do that.