Dubai: With momentum on his side and good past form in the season-ending DP World Tour Championship Justin Rose has a real chance of overtaking Tommy Fleetwood at the Race to Dubai’s last hurdle this weekend.

The 37-year-old 2013 US Open-winning Englishman has also done it before, memorably winning the final event of the 2007 season in a play-off at the Volvo Masters at Valderrama, to overtake Ernie Els to become Order of Merit champion for the first time.

He comes into this event fresh off the back of two consecutive wins at the WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai and the Turkish Airlines Open in Antalya, before sitting out last week’s Nedbank Golf Challenge in Sun City to rest.

With those back-to-back wins in hand, Rose is now just more than 250,000 points behind Fleetwood, who doesn’t have the same record in this tournament, isn’t as well rested having played in the Nedbank where he finished tied for 10th, and only averaged tied for 20th finishes in the two previous events that Rose won in China and Turkey.

Fleetwood only needs to equal or better Rose’s finishing position in Dubai to take the overall season’s prize, whereas Rose must finish no worse than solo fifth. So long as Fleetwood doesn’t win, a solo second place finish would be enough for Rose to nick his second Order of Merit.

Looking at past form in this event, Rose is also more comfortably poised. He’s twice finished second here in 2012 and 2014, with three top 10s in five appearances, and has tellingly also been here before in the money list coming into the last event.

He finished second in the Race to Dubai in 2012, third in both 2013 and 2014 and fourth in 2015. If anyone has the experience of being in this position at this stage of the season, while also knowing what it takes to do well over the Earth Course at Jumeirah Golf Estates, it’s him. And it’s about time he finally got over the line.

The Course

Fellow Englishman Fleetwood, 26, by comparison has never been this high up in the Race to Dubai, and only has one top 10 finish here in four appearances, which was a ninth place finish last year.

The European Tour’s number-crunchers have put the probability of Fleetwood succeeding at 73 per cent, with Rose at 24 per cent. But when you take the above evidence into account, you’d be inclined to give Rose more credit.

Masters champion Garcia is the third name in this equation who, placed a million points behind Fleetwood and 800,000 behind Rose, officially only has a three per cent chance of causing an upset.

The 37-year-old Spaniard would need to win and hope Fleetwood finishes outside the top 20, and Rose finishes worse than solo fourth, to pull off one of the greatest final event comebacks in Race to Dubai history.

Like Rose, Garcia has some form in this event, having finished inside the top 25 in all six of his appearances here — his best being a seventh-placed finish in the tournament’s inaugural year in 2009 — however, he’s never finished inside the top five.

He has also had three previous Race to Dubai top 10 finishes but has never been this high up, and in contention, coming into the last event, so can’t claim quite the same experience as Rose.

As per rest and form, he hasn’t featured in any of the past three tournaments in China, Turkey or South Africa, but did win the event before that in Spain.

With that in mind, he’s firing but could come into this event too rested and without the experience and history here to create what would be a monumental upset, making his three per cent chance seeming even less likely.

The above drama more than makes up for the fact that neither Rory McIlroy nor Henrik Stenson, will feature this week due to injury.

Both are firm favourites in this event having each won the DP World Tour Championship twice. McIlroy has also sealed the Race to Dubai here three times, while Henrik has done it twice.

Their absences won’t take the shine off the US$8 million (Dh29.4 million) tournament though, where aside from the three-way battle for the Race to Dubai between Fleetwood, Rose and Garcia, the top 45 in the standings — bar McIlroy and Stenson — could still make it into the top 10 for a slice of the US$5 million bonus pool.