BEST OF friends, best of enemies! Justin Rose beat best golfing buddie Ian Poulter in a glorious shoot-out for the Victor Chandler British Masters Championship at Woburn yesterday.

The 21-year-old from Hook in Hampshire became the youngest winner of the title with a 19-under-par total, achieved with astonishing back-to-back rounds of 65, getting him home by one shot from local hero Poulter, from just down the road at Leighton Buzzard and had put Rose up during the tournament.

Rose keeps lining up his targets and knocking them down like ninepins. He began the season with a pledge to win his first European Tour event, duly delivered in only the second event of the season, the Dunhill Championship in his native South Africa.

Then he clinched his place in the British Open by winning the Nashua Masters on the South African Sunshine Tour and for good measure triumphed in Japan before returning home to chase glory on home spoil.

And after yesterday's victory on the Marquess Course, he beamed: "This is the one that means the most. Winning in front of my family and friends is just everything I have dreamed of."

So what next for Master Rose? A major? With the British Open coming up at Muirfield next month, he can't be ruled out on this form.

The £208,330 victor's cheque at Woburn moved him up to seventh in the Volvo European Order of Merit and sent him soaring into the top 50 in the Sony World Rankings - just a week too late to get him into the US Open.

Rose looked the finished article with a cool, controlled, classy performance down the narrow manicured fairways of the Marquess where tall pines stand like sentinels ready to snare any ball that strays off line.

Rose had the all-round game to first catch third round leader, Ryder Cup man Phillip Price, then Poulter who was playing like a demon, holing chips, holing bunker shots in a desperate effort to fend off Rose's growing threat.

The Hampshire youngster began the day three behind Price, who led Poulter by a shot. He interruped his warm-up to catch some of England's first-half against Sweden, but it didn't show as he left himself just a three-foot putt for bidie at the first.

A four at the par five second suggested Rose was set for a repeat of Saturday's performance when he birdied the first four holes. Although the run came to a brief halt, he was soon picking up shots again, nailing a 20-footer for three at the fifth, taking just two shots to reach the 538-yard seventh en-route to a four before reaching the turn in 32 - four under.

The two young guns were pressuring Price into mistakes and he fell out of it with a double bogey at the 13th where Poulter also dropped a shot and Rose moved in to share of the lead. When Poulter came up short at the 16th then fluffed a six-foot putt, Rose, who had birdied 11, 12 and 14, was leading on his own. Poulter played his last throw of the dice up the last with a superb approach shot to within seven feet of the pin but his putt to force a play-off, slithered past the hole.