NORMALLY a tranquil place of rhododendron bushes, where the customary sounds are the click of a ball on a golf club and the chink of glasses and teacups, the silence at Wentworth was disturbed yesterday as “the Montgomerie affair” — in which the Scot has been accused of replacing his ball in a more favourable position — took a new turn, overshadowing the last round of the BMW Championship and the fact that he had qualified for the US Open. George O’Grady, the executive director of the European Tour, got Gary Evans in his sights and gave the player both barrels.

O’Grady spoke with what can be described only as “controlled anger” about Evans’s allegations about Colin Montgomerie in yesterday’s newspapers. O’Grady suggested that Evans was being disrespectful by undermining the leadership of the European Tour as well as the authority of the Tournament Committee and Jamie Spence, its chairman. Although he stopped short of saying that Evans should be fined, O’Grady called for him to apologise.

Then Montgomerie, whose impressive display at Wentworth, combined with the fact that Kirk Triplett failed to finish second the FedEx St Jude Classic in Memphis, put him in the top 50 in the world, thus allowing him entry into the second major championship of the year, had his turn to respond to Evans’s allegations. Buoyed by an outstanding last round of 66, which meant that he finished five under par, Montgomerie said he was “ surprised” and “very hurt” by what Evans had said and that he thought the issue was dead and buried. “I am just glad I was able to do what I did today on the golf course and go out and prove to myself and to everyone else that I can still do this.”

The Montgomerie affair, which has rumbled on for some weeks, centres on the view that the Scot replaced his ball in a more favourable position in a bunker when he returned on the morning of the third day to complete his second round of a tournament in Jakarta last March. When bad weather caused play to be ended early, Montgomerie left his ball in a bunker and returned the next day to find it had been stolen.

Although Montgomerie was absolved of wrongdoing by José Maria Zamora, the tournament director, and later by the Tournament Committee, the committee did express “dissatisfaction” about the incident. At about this time, Montgomerie announced that he was giving his £24,000 prize-money to the tsunami relief fund.

O’Grady’s anger yesterday, the last day of the flagship event of the European Tour, was generated because he thought that the matter had been dealt with at the players’ annual meeting the previous Wednesday. Montgomerie and Evans were at that meeting to hear O’Grady praise the tour staff and field staff and suggest that the decision of the 14-man Tournament Committee, the Tour’s rule-making body, meant that nothing further needed to be done.

Instead, Evans reopened the issue on Saturday, when he said that he thought that there was a bit of smoke around Montgomerie. “I’m not saying that Monty is lying,” Evans said, “but why would you give your prize-money to charity? The players feel that he should have been penalised two shots at the time or disqualified. If he is so upset, why not disqualify himself and give his money back to the Tour? It is unprofessional not to mark your ball. I have seen players mark their ball on a green and put two pegs on either side of it.” Evans also suggested that there should be a 24 or 48-hour period after the end of a tournament when anything dubious could be discussed by the authorities.

“Statements in the press about other players after your elected officials have made a statement are enormously disrespectful,” O’Grady said. “I’d expect him (Evans) to apologise to Jamie Spence and the other members of the committee for undermining their leadership. I expect him to apologise to his colleagues. The European Tour is unique because the players are involved in these decisions.”