Will This Become The Most Used Winter Golf Accessory?

My golf club, along with many other golf clubs up and down the country, are enforcing the compulsory use of winter mats for the first time, and as a result, a product like the Spurk Golf Short Pile mat, might just become one of the most used winter golf accessories.

But is it all doom and gloom? I got my hands on both the short pile and the long pile mats and tested them thoroughly at my home club to see if my preconceptions about how naff it is to use these type of mats can be quashed.

The first impressions were good - it comes in a nifty little bag, which costs a little extra. You don't have to buy the bag, but it's very useful in that you can attach it to your golf bag using the clip for easy access and to save space for the other kit you might need to carry like waterproofs.

It uses six spikes on the bottom protruding at an angle to keep it in place when you're hitting shots. You have to angle it in a way where the spikes point towards the hitting direction, put it on the ground, line it up roughly to your target, tread it down with your foot, and you're good to go. Now, obviously, if you've got muddy shoes, you might well transfer some of the mud onto the mat, which would be annoying, but it does wipe off pretty easily.

You've got to make sure you have the tapered black section at the back. That ensures that you don't have any sort of fat shot disasters where if you do catch the ball heavy, you don't hurt your wrists or the mat flies off. I have to say the mat is long enough where that shouldn't happen, and if you are prone to the odd fat shot, you want to basically position the ball maybe slightly further away from that to reduce the risk of that happening.

Now, when I was hitting shots, I was surprised at how realistic the hitting experience was. The ball flights were very good, if anything a little higher than what I would get off the grass - probably because the ball sits up very cleanly but also because the mat moves down a little as you strike it, which causes the ball to pop up and strike the ball a little higher on the face. But the difference in trajectory and distance is negligible.

You do need to grip down the club a little bit to account for the ball being slightly more above your feet. This is probably more the case with the long pile mat, although you'd be technically probably using that in the rough, so it'd basically be the same as having a good lie in the rough. There's no grain really with the short pile mat, but on the long pile mat you do get a bit more grain on it which runs towards the target, so even though it's longer, you can still get a clean lie.

I hit wedge shots, seven irons, and even a mini driver off the short pile mat and was able to strike them all cleanly - the difference in my angle of attack didn’t seem to make much difference to the resistance of movement on the mat and on all of my shots, the mat remained in place. Overall, using the mat didn't really detract from the experience that much, and I was surprised at how much it felt like hitting shots on a driving range.

While a lot of golf courses relax the rules on usage around the greens there’s no doubt it makes chipping a whole lot easier. You get a perfectly clean lie, can manipulate it to be flat if you want to, which means you can generate an awful lot of spin. Obviously with no rough or dirt in the way of the strike, you can really nip those chip shots and be a bit more aggressive with your landing spots, especially with the soft greens. You can fly the ball most of the way and you know the ball's going to stop.

If your club is one of many like mine that have introduced the compulsory use of winter mats during the off-season, don't despair. Using them actually didn't really detract from the experience on the course. It makes the game a lot easier, so you can probably expect to shoot decent scores. You're not going to be affected by mud or having a bad lie in the fairway, and your course is going to look and stay in better condition, which means it should look and recover from the winter much faster and return to its summer conditions earlier, which is good for everyone.

I understand it's not as good as the real deal, but it's probably as close to the real deal as you're going to get, and there is the added benefit, so Spurk Golf says, of the aeration from the spikes into the fairways. I can't confirm or deny if that is actually the case, but I can see the argument.

At £35 including the bag, it's a relatively modest investment for something you’re going to use every time you play in the winter and don’t forget, you can use it in your garden at home to practice your chipping or hit full shots into a net. So when you consider how much you're probably going to use it, there's seemingly good value here, and I have to say, after my testing session, there wasn't much marking of the mat or degrading of the quality of the grass.

You’ve just got to make sure you clean the sole of your clubs before you hit a shot, because if you're transferring mud onto the mat, then that's when it will start to look tired. But if you keep your clubs clean, then your mat should look pristine and in good condition for a good few seasons.