Q.  Dave, start with you.  You haven’t played a lot of golf the last couple years, but when you do, you play it pretty well, or when you make a week in, you make the most of it.  What’s been happening the last couple years?

DAVID SMAIL:  I sort of played okay at the start of the year, I finished second at the PGA there, New Zealand PGA.  Tore my rotor cuff and that was at one of the Charles Tour events and I just sort of took a long time to come right.  And at the same time we planned a family holiday, so I was away for six weeks in Europe, just put the clubs away.  Then I just got them out and thought I would go back to Japan Tour school and give that a go, so that’s the only golf I played was two weeks ago.

Q.  How did you fare? 

DAVID SMAIL:  I got through the first stage and missed in the final, so Senior Tour next year.  I’m 50 in May.

Q.  Okay, right.  Where?  In Europe? 

DAVID SMAIL:  I’ll play Japan to start with.

Q.  Normal Japan Golf Tour? 

DAVID SMAIL:  No, I’ll play Japan Senior Tour.  They have about 18 events and pretty good prize money, so I’ll play there for a year and see what happens.  If I’m playing all right, I might go to America.

Q.  Obviously got a great record up there, so I guess that past history there gets you automatic starts and you can play as many events as you want? 

DAVID SMAIL:  Yeah, I get straight in.  I don’t have to go to the Senior Tour school again.  It’s nice.

Q.  So when you came back from your shoulder injury, expectations?  Were you sort of keen to get ‑‑

DAVID SMAIL:  Very low.

Q.  Were you kind of keen to get back into it? 

DAVID SMAIL:  I worked really hard trying to do a lot of practice.  And yeah, but it’s a little bit different when you haven’t been playing, you sort of lose just a little tiny itch and probably had enough rounds to get back into it more and start to feel like I belong again here.

Q.  What about these young blokes?  There’s a group of them coming out of New Zealand.  I mean Foxy’s a bit older than a few of them, but ‑‑

DAVID SMAIL:  Yeah, there’s some great talent coming through.  Nick played great today, just had an unfortunate finish, but Denzel’s playing fantastic golf as well.  Those two guys are just killing it, killing it off the tee.  They’ve got a hundred yards, I can’t even see them down the fairway really, I’m about a hundred yards behind them at times.  It’s not much fun, that part.

Q.  For you, Nick, the group of you to come through, you and Denzell went to college together, and how old is Ryan?

NICK VOKE:  Ruffles?

Q.  No, Chisnall. 

NICK VOKE:  Oh, Chizzy.  He’s the same age, 24, 25.

Q.  Do you guys play much together?  Did you all come through together?

NICK VOKE:  Yeah, we have.  I’ll probably throw Luke Toomey in that mix as well.  We played the Eisenhower together in maybe 2016 or ’15 and it’s kind of cool to see different development pathways coming together and playing well at big events like this.

Q.  You have status on the Korn Ferry Tour?

NICK VOKE:  Yeah. 

Q.  How does I guess reaching the top 40 affect that?

NICK VOKE:  Yeah, it’s all up in the air.  You just kind of go off like past years and who was the last player in that field.  So just doing some quick math, we might get one or two out of the first eight, and then from the events eight to 16, I have a chance of getting in a few.  So we’ll be ready for when the opportunity comes and we’ll strike then and kind of re‑rank up through the system and away we go.

Q.  You guys are all pretty ‑‑ what’s that group for you guys?  Do you keep in touch with each other? 

NICK VOKE:  We do, we do.  We use Snapchat because you can kind of see some pretty faces in that system.  Yeah, like Dan Hillier, Tooms, Chiz, there’s a few of us that kind of came up through that New Zealand rank and it a just pretty cool to be able to go to the opposite side of the world and be able to represent the country somewhere.  We kind of came together, we went to Abu Dhabi for the Nomura Cup, keep in contact, wish each other the best and have a bit of banter back and forth when it needs to be.

Q.  Does it provide motivation when you see the other guys doing well?

NICK VOKE:  It does, it does.  Like I was very fortunate when I went through my run in China, I stayed with Luke Toomey the whole time and he kind of knew the ropes and knew what to do and what not to do in China.  It’s a little different over there. 

So kind of learning off those guys and feeding off each other.  I think he was impressed at the run that I went on over there, now he’s gone on a similar tear winning two Charles Tour events back to back.  It’s really cool to see us progressing up through the ranks.  Big events like this, we’ll get a massive Airbnb and like ‑‑ 

Q.  Is that what you’re doing this week?

NICK VOKE:  Yeah, with Denzell.  We’re playing some good cool (indiscernible) at night.  So the Queenstown pro‑am’s coming up January the 3rd to 5th I believe and we’re looking at a six person Airbnb, so it will be fun.