Andrei Shevchenko should have fun on the golf course, not be deluded into thinking he can make it One is more likely to glimpse a power station's cooling tower on this stretch of featureless plateau than any quaint white clapboards. But it is playing host to an enviable field and it can be only be guessed how Oliver Wilson, a former Ryder Cup player, and Nick Dougherty, the fallen posterchild of the European Tour, feel at being bracketed on the same plane of competence as a superannuated footballer trying his luck. At least Shevchenko's commitment cannot be disparaged. This summer he partnered Rory McIlroy in a pro-am at Maynooth, and he has been slavishly adding subtlety to his game since confirming his retirement in 2012. There are echoes here of Ivan Lendl, a scratch player who spends as much time in training sessions talking about golf to Andy Murray as tennis, and it is little coincidence that the line-up in Ukraine also features Yevgeny Kafelnikov, a former world No1 and briefly a contemporary of Lendl's. These men, unmotivated by money given that Kalfenikov still has enough roubles to buy a small Caucasus town, need to keep kindling the competitive fires burning to fill their waking hours. It is the same for plucky Jimmy Bullard, seeking desperately to fill the void left by his injury-truncated football career by qualifying for the EuroPro Tour, continental golf's equivalent of League One. "I've always loved my golf, so I thought: "Why not give it a crack?" " he said. He had talked of a "depressing" lull in his sporting life, of an absence of purpose, of a meandering and directionless existence. His solution is a brave one, exchanging the collective spirit of the dressing room for the often aching solitude of a spell on the golfing periphery, but for one flung on the professional scrap-heap as precipitately as Bullard it is an essential way of restoring structure to his days - a form of self-legitimisation, no less. Occasionally alpha-male footballers will rebel against the notion that they should mark their dotage by slipping into a Pringle sweater and doing nothing more athletic than smoothing out their backswing. Jamie Carragher remains such a coiled bundle of energy that he claims to prefer squash, suggesting that golf would not give him a sufficiently rigorous outlet. But the transition between the sports is now so well-established that this year marked the first instalment of the "Professional Footballers" Golf Tournament," an ersatz Ryder Cup imitation held in the suitably gaudy surrounds of Las Vegas. If you needed any extra illustration that golf remains the passion du jour in the upper reaches of our national game, search for Wayne Rooney's remarkably nuanced observations on the sport - not least when he waxed lyrical on Twitter about the 2011 USPGA play-off between Jason Dufner and Keegan Bradley. When England manager Roy Hodgson chose to hold a golf day for his charges at The Grove last June, it was by common consent the most successful team-bonding exercise in years. But it would be salutary for any players plotting a change of course to remember the devilish difficulty of transforming a pastime into a surrogate profession. Tim Henman, another to have discovered that golf harnesses the same co-ordination and muscle movements as tennis, scoffs at the suggestion that his plus-two handicap might enable him to hold his own among the pros. "I'm about a billion years away," he says. They're in a completely different orbit. Those words ought not to discourage Shevchenko as he embarks upon this latest unlikely chapter. They ought to suppress, however, any unrealistic delusions of grandeur.