When Tiger Woods hit a staggeringly brilliant six-iron into Kingston Heath's 16th hole to finish off the last couple of challengers at the 2009 Australian Masters, few doubted another year of dominance lay ahead.

Instead he returns to Melbourne and Victoria GC, the home course of Peter Thomson and Geoff Ogilvy, as the defending champion of the only title he still holds. A year of unimagined tumult stopped his career in its tracks - he lost his No.1 ranking as his private life became tabloid fodder - and only now is he really starting to regain some momentum.

Woods is working on another major swing change, this time with Sean Foley, and the assumption is that his aim is to get the swing geometry organized before Augusta and the US Masters in April.

Victoria, like Kingston Heath, is a relatively short course by modern standards but there is plenty of golf to play and it will provide a much more interesting test than the weekly overseas diet of European and American tour courses where long grass surrounding greens and narrow fairways lined with thick, green rough is the norm.

At Victoria, the greens are entirely surrounded by short grass bringing extra dimensions to the chipping and pitching and the fairways are quite wide but Woods and many of the rest will be taking fairway woods and irons of several of the tees. Woods, crooked at best with his driver of late, could conceivably play all week with the long iron off the tee as he did when he won The Open Championship at Hoylake in 2006.

There he played the final day with Spaniard Sergio Garcia. Garcia putted his way out of that championship very early on and a year later at Carnoustie he missed a three-metre putt to beat Padraig Harrington in The Open.

The Spaniard won The Players Championship in Florida last year and was probably then ranked in the top two or three in the world but he plays this week from outside the official top 50.

If talent and the ability to hit a variety of shots of the highest quality were the measure, Garcia would never be outside of the top handful of players but he talks of being tired of the grind and the baulky putter that seems to be the culprit responsible for his fall.

He is a brilliant driver of the ball and whilst the observation of Woods will be interesting, watching Garcia may be even more fascinating. The galleries will be more manageable and there is no question he is still one of the best players out there to watch play the game. He played well at Valderrama, probably the most difficult course on the European continent, a couple of weeks ago and he would like nothing better than to give Tiger more than a run for his money. Likewise Tiger has always seems to enjoy beating the Spaniard.

Ogilvy obviously knows the course better than any of the rest and he will be well-rested and ready to play. Last year he chased around the world playing events all over the Middle East, Asia and at home and he is one who plays better when he plays less.

Like almost all of the best players in the game he plays the modern powerful game dominated by long drives, big high irons and brilliant short irons.

That is what is demanded by the soft, long, generally windless courses of America, and increasingly Europe, but Ogilvy has noted that sort of golf ''turns you into a bad player''.

It is so one-dimensional but those who have not seen Victoria will know there will be different questions to be answered this week when they stand on the very first tee and confront a 233-metre par four that most will be able to reach with a long iron.

The great designer Alister MacKenzie had a hand at Victoria and whilst not responsible for the routing or the hole, he was fond of holes on the borderline of par and this one is truly a three-and-a-half par that will make a seat in the grandstands around the tee and green a worthwhile place to spend a few hours.