Playing in his national Open for the seventh time, Annato shot 2-under 70 in Round 2 at Royal Port Moresby Golf Club to make the cut in the largest field ever assembled for the PNG Open.

It will be the fifth time Annato plays the weekend against the leading players from the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia, but potentially the most important thanks to a lure from a personal sponsor.

“I got a dream. I think some of my sponsors want to send me down to Aussie to do a Q School,” Annato said after his round.

“They told me that as soon as you made the cut, we would send you down there, but I’ll just wait for them. I’ll fix my visa and all sort of things and then they’ll send me down there.”

It is a potentially historic opportunity for a country that has never had a player earn status to play the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia.

Nelson Gabriel and the late August Peni are acknowledged as PNG’s greatest male professional players, but neither played tournaments in Australia.

Annato hopes to change that, all thanks to birdies on the seventh and ninth holes on Friday that will see him enter the weekend in a tie for 39th at 2-over par.

It is the third straight year that Annato has made the cut, a feat he attributes to putting on greens that can confound visiting players.

“Some of them are missing those short putts. And then for me, I just come and bang it in,” he added.

“It’s my own culture here. I get more advantage.”

Advancing golf in Papua New Guinea has been a growing focus with each staging of the PNG Open since 2016.

Junior players were given the opportunity to learn from the professionals in Wednesday’s Junior Pro-Am, 20 leading amateurs were granted exemptions into the field this week and this weekend will see the first staging of the PNG Women’s Open.

Each represents an important step down the path of a Papua New Guinean golfer one day joining the world stage.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Papua New Guinea Prime Minister, Hon. James Marape.

“Sport does sell our country’s image. Sport does inform the world who we are. And here you have professional golfers coming from right across the world to come in to play in Port Moresby.

“This is also a stepping stone for some of them into future professional careers. You never know, we wish each player who’s come here all the very best in their own golfing careers.

“Hopefully some of them down the line, we will make it through the entire professional golf rankings, become established professional golfers themselves and they can take the memory of their time and the weekend in PNG.”

As the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia embarks on its new season, long-time Tournament Director Graeme Scott expressed the hopes of the PGA of Australia that players from PNG will become regulars on Tour sooner rather than later.

“It’s very much our goal to have your aspiring professionals and young players coming to play on our Tour,” Scott said.

“It’s the closest professional Tour to them and so we would very, very much like in the future to see young players coming forward.

“That, of course, is the reason we have 20 elite amateurs playing this week because it’s not just playing in a tournament. This is a chance for them to play in a professional environment and it’s a step up in all aspects of the game. Not just how they play but how they conduct themselves and how they see other professionals conduct themselves.

“They are now able to benchmark themselves to see where their game’s at and where they need to get to take that next step.”

A step Annato is now closer to making.