THE RAIN hosed down with the force of a monsoon. It was as though a thousand Brobdingnagian showers had been turned on simultaneously. It was, somehow, symbolic; a proud record was being washed away before our eyes. Lee Westwood no longer looked like the young pretender to Colin Montgomerie's throne. By sheer strength of will, courage and skill, he was taking it away by force. Things might never be the same again for either of them. The bald fact is that Westwood won the Cisco World Match Play Championship yesterday on the 38th hole of a final that will live long in the memory. His victory meant that he equalled the European record of six tournament wins in a season held by Severiano Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Montgomerie himself. He did so, furthermore, by beating the player whose past achievements entitled him to regard Wentworth as his personal fiefdom.

Westwood's £250,000 prize did not count towards anything except his bank balance — not the order of merit, not the Ryder Cup qualifying table, nothing. But of all the benefits accruing to him, the money was possibly the least significant. Of infinitely greater import was the fact that the impression he has given in the past few weeks of being an order-of-merit winner in waiting was strengthened with his victory over the man who has won the title for the past seven years.

When the weeks have passed and it becomes clearer how much the disappointment of defeat has affected Montgomerie's psyche, Westwood's performance at Wentworth might be worth more than any amount of mere cash.

If Montgomerie had prevailed in this event for the second year running, it would have been his fifth win in his past six appearances at the West Course — three Volvo PGA successes and two World Match Plays. It was not to be.

Westwood won with an 18-foot birdie putt on the second extra hole after two rounds of enthralling golf between players at the top of their form. Yet the putt he hit on the 35th hole was just as pivotal.

Montgomerie, who had been two down when the match was suspended overnight, was grimly determined and by the scheduled penultimate hole he looked likely to take the lead going to the last.

Both men's minds and bodies must have been in turmoil, soaked with exhaustion, at that moment. Montgomerie, who outdrove his opponent by 25 yards, hit the green in two and Westwood's failure to make what needed to be a definitively pure contact with his driver off the fairway left him a pitch from perhaps 80 yards. It was one of the few poor shots either man struck all day, and he followed it with another, a wedge that skipped 25 feet past the hole with the exuberance of a Twenties flapper.

Westwood did not need the Charleston at that moment, he wanted a sedate slow foxtrot, but he redeemed himself with a coolly brilliant putt to match Montgomerie's birdie. I expected him to hole it, Montgomerie said later. You've got to expect the worst at all times. Yes, I expected it to go in, but I was still surprised when it did! With all still to play for, Westwood again proved his powers of adhesion when he followed Montgomerie's birdie from eight feet with a three-foot putt of his own. That one tiny shot put the final into a sudden-death play-off for the first time since 1982.

When it was all over, Westwood holing his long putt for a birdie at the short 2nd hole, he allowed himself a small joke that had to do with the fact that Darren Clarke, his friend and managerial comrade, won the WGC-Andersen Consulting World Match Play Championship in February, beating Tiger Woods in the process.

It's nice to have won THE World Match Play, he said. We're going to unify the title in our next practice round. The boxing analogy was not lost on anybody present, especially the man whom he had just knocked out to wrest one of his titles away. It may not be long before he has another.