Players were greeted by perfect conditions on Wednesday morning to begin their second rounds with the gentle breeze fading to give the afternoon groups the perfect opportunity to make their moves up the leaderboard.

The mark they are chasing at present is 8-under par, Warren’s 3-under 69 and a pair of 5-under 67s from McCarthy and Marchesani lifting them to the top alongside overnight leader John Lyras, who is 2-under through seven holes of his second round.

Out of the game for two years after suffering nerve aggravation following a double hernia operation in 2017, McCarthy was prominent at the halfway mark of last week’s Vic PGA but struggled when the tournament moved across to the Open Course, using the day between events on Monday to devise a new approach to a course that has not been kind to him in the past.

“It’s just an enormous golf course that seems to beat me up,” said McCarthy, who was tied for eighth at The Players Series Victoria two weeks ago.

“I sat down Monday feeling a bit miserable about the weekend and thought that someone’s going to shoot 66 around there, how do you do it? How do you break it down?

“There are two short par-4s on each side, there are four par 5s, I’m hitting it well so it was a practice session on Monday and a change in mindset about the whole course.

“I’ve been playing quite solid the past four weeks. I’ve been hitting it really nicely and it’s just nice to see a few of the putts drop in now. I played the par 5s a lot better today than I have in some other sloppier rounds.”

An eagle and two birdies in his final four holes led to a rapid rise for Marchesani while Warren had to call on his days of playing college golf in America for South Mountain Community College and the University of Arkansas to grind out a round of 2-under 69.

“Bit of a frustrating day,” Warren conceded. “Bogey-free round of 69 could quite easily have been a lot worse if I didn’t do what I did on the front nine but could have been a hell of a lot better if I’d holed a few putts on the back.

“I do my absolute best to never give up on a round and a little bit of that has to do with the college background, playing college team golf over in America. We play 54-hole tournaments and if you have a bad first day you can’t throw in the towel and give up.

“You’ve still got your teammates relying on you to produce some scores over the next couple of days so the team can have a good chance at winning the golf tournament.

“Regardless of how bad I start or whatever I do to stick to whatever I’ve been working on, keep grinding and eventually that little amazing stretch of holes could start at any moment.”

Just 10 days out of hotel quarantine having returned from spending the past five months in America, Wollongong’s Travis Smyth gathered confidence with the putter in round one and cashed in on Wednesday morning to be one shot off the lead following a round of 5-under 67.

“I hit it OK last week (at the Vic PGA) but my putting was terrible,” said Smyth.

“I kept saying to myself that missing the cut might have been a blessing in disguise because it gave me two days to just go and work on it. I practiced my putting a lot and the last two days I’ve been putting nicely. I feel like I’m back to normal.

“It was a pretty solid two-club wind yesterday and I was hitting a lot of fairways, hitting a lot of greens, putted it pretty nicely.

“I had a few testy par putts that I holed to bring the confidence up and it was just really solid. I was very much looking forward to coming out today and the weather turned out perfect.”