There’s no point plootering about the bush. “I was p***ed off,” said Scott Henry on the other end of the telephone. And no, he wasn’t cursing this correspondent for calling him in Oman and probably incurring the kind of hefty mobile charges that would make a Sultan shudder.

The cause of his general disgruntlement was this infuriating game of golf. This week, on the south eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the Challenge Tour season will draw to a close with the second-tier circuit’s Grand Final with only the top 45 players on the money list competing in the 72-hole shoot-out. When it’s all done and dusted in the desert on Saturday night, the leading 15 players on that order of merit will have earned promotion to the main European Tour. There’s plenty to play for.

For Henry, the 2015 campaign has been a bit of a grind. There was a second place finish in the Madeira Islands Open to raise the morale but a series of fairly hum-drum results have left him on the outside peering in. Henry currently sits in 20th spot on the Challenge Tour rankings, five places and some £5249 short of the promotion zone. It’s just been one of those years. In fact, make that two years. “This season has been almost a mirror image of the 2014 one,” said the 28-year-old. “I had a second place finish in Madeira last year and slipped away and the same happened this year. For the first time I can remember, I was p***ed off with the game, particularly at the start of the season. I’ve always been a 100 per cent kind of guy but I felt I was putting a hell of a lot of work in and not getting much out. I actually didn’t enter some of the earlier Challenge Tour events because I didn’t have the motivation. That’s the first time in my career that I’d felt that and it took me a few events to get the bug back again.”

Henry heads into the season-ending showdown having missed three cuts in his last four events and given that spell of tournaments included costly hikes to such far flung places as Kazakhstan and China, the former Scottish Boys’ champion probably could have done without an expensive blether with this scribbler on his ruddy phone. The last few weeks may not have been very profitable but Henry is feeling decidedly upbeat.

Having forged a new alliance with Andrew Nicholson, a respected coach with the David Leadbetter Academy at The Wynyard in County Durham, Henry is beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel. In this era of crash, bang, wallop golf, his power and distance off the tee had been a significant weapon in the armoury but over the last couple of seasons the impact has been slowly diminishing. “My golf swing has gradually been getting worse these last two years, there’s no doubt about that,” conceded Henry, who finished fourth in the 2013 Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles during a rookie season on the main tour in which he narrowly failed to keep his card. “My right arm was moving through the whole swing and was causing big problems off the tee. It became such a hindrance. Driving was the strongest aspect of my game. I was one of the longest, if not the longest, players on tour but I was also on the fairway too. What started to develop, though, was that I was losing distance and I was hitting it more offline, the two worst things that could happen to a player like me. It went from my biggest advantage to my biggest weakness. The last couple of years have not been good enough. Results have been sporadic and I needed to freshen things up and that’s what I’ve done. I need a big performance this week or it’s the qualifying school in a couple of weeks. But I don’t feel any pressure. I’m not on the bubble or defending a position on the money list so I just have to go out and give it a right good go.”

Henry’s fellow Scots, Andrew McArthur and Jamie McLeary, are both on course to make the step up to the European Tour next season as they sit 10th and 11th respectively on the rankings heading into the final event of the year. Peter Whiteford, the third Scot in the line-up this week, squeezed into the field as the last man at No 45 on the order of merit but, with a purse of almost £270,000, the Fifer could still barge his way into the leading 15 with a rousing last hurrah.