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There should be no doubt that 2010 has the potential to be a vintage year for golf. Forget for a moment the credit crunch, the gaps in the calendar, the tournaments under threat and the sponsorship deals still to be done.

Leave aside the current troubles of the sport's top player and instead look ahead to what should be a fantastic twelve months for golf fans. Here are ten reasons to be cheerful in 2010:

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At last, . Silence has been broken and golf has a voice.

It is a shame it is a monotone, but you can't have everything, and this is , the PGA Tour's Commissioner, we are talking about.

Predictably, the answers weren't exactly dynamite and most could have been anticipated ahead of his traditional year-end teleconference, one that surely attracted a record numbers of listeners.

Finchem managed to deliver a rare dose of good news to the beleaguered Tiger Woods, perhaps the first that's gone the way of the world number one .

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We supposed he would come back at the end of January, we speculated that it might be even sooner at or might he prefer

But if you sat down and thought it through, thought about all that return to action would entail both publicly and privately, it was impossible to envisage him stepping back on to a tee in the foreseeable future.

This has been an astonishing fall from grace. From the height of his powers as one of the most dominant figures in all of sport to after a devastating fortnight of lurid claims and rumours about his private life.

And that a return to the public eye cannot be considered at the moment. It has to be left on one side.

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Where to start? There is so much to discuss at this febrile time for the game, especially with the world number one continuing to be the water-cooler man of the moment.

But let's leave Tiger Woods for now and consider some of the other significant developments that have occurred in the 10 days in which golf, or at least its best player, has been such a dominant topic of conversation.

From a European point of view, perhaps the most significant news has been the announcement of the , coming as it did in the wake of revelations on the size of .

The stricken Emirate is at the heart of the European Tour's strategy and it was clear to anyone who attended last month's that they had done extremely well to keep alive the season ending tournament.

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is striving to be a better person and the husband and father his family deserves. So says his second issued amid a flurry of tabloid claims about his private life.

The world's top golfer has issued a plea for privacy and is dismayed at realising "the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means."

If you thought his Cadillac took a pounding in his accident in the early hours of Friday morning, that's nothing to the battering his image has subsequently taken.

This is the lowest point of what has been to date the most extraordinarily glittering of . The heights he has reached make the fall so much the greater and that's what so whets the appetite of the tabloids. The bigger they are the harder the headlines.

And there is no doubt those are what has prompted the issuing of the statement, no longer could he and his advisors hide behind a "no comment" sign.

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