"At last!” Ian Poulter must have thought to himself yesterday as he hoisted the trophy for victory in the Barclays Singapore Open. It was his tenth professional victory and his first for two years. “At last!” his supporters must have thought, too.

All Poulter’s confident talk and no victories was beginning to wear on them.

Poulter, 33, arrived in the Far East after a six-week break full of confidence. Nothing unusual about that. But for all that he was striking the ball crisply and putting well, he had not won a tournament, nor really threatened in one, for some time.

In Singapore he led by five strokes after 36 holes, was overtaken by Graeme McDowell a couple of times in the last round, yet got to the 72nd tee with a lead of one stroke. A safe par saw him home.

If you lead with your chin as Poulter does and play your golf mainly in the United States, people are going to take shots at you, particularly in Europe. He is regularly accused of being all mouth and trousers, a player who has not won as often as he suggests he should have and one who does not really support the European Tour, because he did not return for the BMW PGA Championship in May.

In Poulter’s case, the first two of these gibes are accurate. Though it is rarely rude, his mouth is big and on occasions in the past it has got him into trouble. Remember the way he once said that when he gets his game going, it would be just him and Tiger? And no one spends so much time on their dress as he does. Darren Clarke likes to wear tailored trousers and so does McDowell, but Poulter has the edge because he owns a firm that designs not just trousers but also shirts as well.

Poulter, then, is often damned and even good play in the 2008 Open, finishing the joint top scorer at last year’s Ryder Cup after being a controversial selection by Nick Faldo and having just ended his best season on the tour in the US has not silenced his critics.

There is a four-letter word that has been used to describe the Englishman. It begins with the letter p and ends with a t. It is unfair because it damns a player for being unusual in a game where the usual is commonplace and it suggests him to be something that he is not. At present, Poulter is to Padraig Harrington, say, what Faldo was to Sandy Lyle in a past generation, a player who is considered to be not quite right when compared to a player who can do little wrong.

Poulter’s victory came over a field that included Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Harrington. It was his first win since victory in the Dunlop Phoenix in Japan in 2007 and his first on the European Tour since the Madrid Masters in 2006, and it took him to tenth in the Race to Dubai standings.