AMATEUR Michael Hunt will lead the Burnley challenge this weekend in the prestigious Scratch Shield event.

With the loss of the club's top amateur Ben Scott to the Lancashire side and the doubts over the fitness of Graham Howarth, who has a shoulder injury, it may be up to 22-year-old Hunt to lead the home team.

And the former St Wilfrid's High School pupil, who come fifth in the Lancashire Amateur Championships last weekend, reckons he is up to the job.

"This will be the third time I have played in the tournament and the first time I will play off scratch so I am really looking forward to it.

"Last year we had a really good chance to win it. Ben (Scott) only needed to par and we would have won but it hammered it down when he was half way through the course and it was abandoned.

"So I am really looking forward to it this year, it has been pencilled into my diary for a while and we have got to fancy our chances round our home course.

"I have had a few people say to me 'if the wind blows we are just going to give it to you' because our course is pretty notorious for that.

"We are just going to give it our all."

The loss of Scott and Howarth, if he is unable to play, will seriously decimate the four-man team. Along with Hunt, ELGA captain Andrew Samuels, Anthony Keenan and Howarth make up the squad, but Clifford Hopwood, whose wife Karen is the lady captain at Burnley, is on stand-by. "I was speaking to Andrew the other day," said Hunt, who has only been playing golf for five years. "And we were saying we have gone from having a plus one, two scratch and a two handicap player in the team to maybe having a scratch and three twos.

"But I think that will still be a good standard for the competition."

Hunt, who hopes to begin PGA Professional Qualification training this year, works in the Pleasington shop with professional Ged Furey, and hopes to become a professional himself.

He will also take a shot at the British Open for the first time this year.

"I am hoping to have a go in the professional game but then I will have the qualification to fall back on, if it doesn't work out.

"Ged has been helping me a lot on the mental side of my game. He has given me a few tips and I have just been busting a gut to get my handicap down and I have finally made it to scratch."

A fifth-placed finish in the Lancashire Amateur Championships -- the first time Hunt had even qualified for the finals -- was both disappointing and pleasing, he said.

"I was in the top three going in to the final round after shooting five under in the first but then I started to get nervous for five or six holes to go.

"A couple of putts let me down and I ended up finishing fifth, three under, but that wasn't bad considering I was four over after eight holes.

"So I was a bit disappointed but not overall. Last year I would have lost my head after going on that little run but the work we have been doing on my mental attitude has really paid off."