(Mike Clayton is the founder and director of Clayton Ogilvy Golf Design.)

The National Open this week in Sydney seems certain to be one played under grey skies with accompanying showers and wind. On a course as exposed as The Lakes, that will make it no easy assignment for the players although the new greens will be softer than normal for a big Australian championship and nor is the course overly long by the standards of modern professional golf.

Much of the pre-tournament debate has centred around the redesigned golf course and being the one with my name on the company that did the work it is a more than interesting week to observe how the players go about answering the questions posed by the golf course.

No doubt some will like the course, some will like parts of it but not others and there will be some who don't fancy it at all.

Greg Norman of course carries the weightiest (but not necessarily the most worthwhile) opinion because he is Greg Norman and it seems he is no great fan of the work.

''Severe'' was his description. He thought it easier off the tee and professed affection for the ‘Old Lakes'.

It is wider off the tee but there is a direct relationship between the width and the difficulty of the new and more undulating greens.

The aim was to move away from narrow tree- lined fairways and to create space off the tee but to ally that with greens that needed to be approached from one side of the fairway or the other.

Readers may assume the logical place from which to earn the greatest reward and the easiest approach would be the middle of the fairway. I have a much different philosophy. Like tennis the reward ought to go to the player who plays closest to the edges (lines in the game of Federer) and those edges are usually guarded by sand or, in the case of the best-known holes at The Lakes, the water.

Norman thought the driving looked easier and it is if the aim is to hit the fairway. It is not easier if the aim is to earn the best line into the flags because that means taking a different route to the hole and driving closer to the trouble.

The other stark difference from the ‘Old Lakes' is the lack of trees on the front nine.

The tree debate is interesting because so many only remember the course, and more specifically the front nine with its seven holes on the ‘other side' of the freeway, as a tree-lined group of holes.

The history of the club is that the original course was bisected by the airport to city freeway in the late 1960s and Bruce Devlin and Robert Von Hagge were commissioned to build a new course.

The original pre-1970 course was a windswept sandy, undulating course and old photos show there were almost no trees on the course. Devlin and Von Hagge's new course was built in the same fashion but committees laid the foundations of alteration by lining the fairways of the early holes with pine and invasive coastal tea-tree.

Our view was that they were trees, non-indigenous trees, that should never have been planted and we argued for their removal and a return to the way the land once was.

For only 20 or so years of the more than 80 of the club's existence there were no trees on the golf course and that windswept, open feeling was the way of the more traditional links of Great Britain.

This is mistakenly called a links course. It is not because the softer kikuyu fairways make it play quite differently from a fast running, fescue grassed, links and nor is it close enough to the sea to have all the crumpled undulations of a true links. It is a course in the dunes and the back nine is dominated by huge lakes that Devlin and Von Hagge created holes that demand shots more likely to be found in the United States than in Britain or a traditional Australian championship course.

There are favoured winners and at the top of the list are the back-in-form Adam Scott and Geoff Ogilvy. Both hit the towering long shots that one needs at the big par fives on the back nine but Ogilvy has the superior short game and on the difficult greens an array of little shots from around the edges will be an important part of winning this week.

Norman is an unknown quality this week because he barely plays anymore but fellow senior, Fred Couples is still playing wonderful golf. Couples is one of the top ten players of all time if ‘fun to watch' is the measure and Ogilvy has long argued that Couples is still one of the best ball-strikers in the game.

Another visitor, John Daly (pictured above, on the practice putting green on Tuesday) can also be found on the 'fun to watch' list, but might not have the consistency to contend this week.

(The Australian Open begins at The Lakes on Thursday morning and will be televised by Channel Ten. The latest TAB odds.)