In case you missed it, Anna Nordqvist was announced this week as the European Solheim Cup captain for the 2026 match, which is to be held at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands.  It must have been one of the easiest choices for any tour ever to make.

The tall, elegant Swede has been a Solheim Cup fixture since her rookie year as a professional in 2009.  Her first professional win was in that rookie year and amazingly it was an LPGA major title she scooped, the McDonald’s LPGA Championship.  That victory served to bring her sharply to the attention of the 2009 Solheim Cup captain Alison Nicholas who asked me did I know anything about Anna.  My reply was in the negative but Alison responded saying that that didn’t really matter as far as she was concerned.  Nordqvist was a winner and that was the calibre of player she wanted in her team.  Little did we realise she’d be a fixture on the team for the next decade and a half.

And so began an impressive career for the now 37-year old.  She has played nine times in the Solheim Cup, twice as a playing vice-captain, and she has three majors in the bag as well as nine other titles and a couple of Olympic appearances.  It is fitting on every level that she should lead the Europeans next year and, who knows, perhaps she’ll be a playing captain?  That would be a formidable task indeed but I’ve no doubt she’ll make the right decisions if that is even close to becoming a reality.

Oh yes, and if my life depended on it she is absolutely the player I would choose to hole a six-footer for me.  No question.

There are a few, interesting rumblings emanating from the women’s tours about a new outline for a global tour.   Matters appear to be spearheaded by Albane Valenzuela, the Swiss Solheim Cup player who met ten days ago with Liz Moore, the interim commissioner of the LPGA and Alex Armas, boss of the Ladies’ European Tour (LET), to put her case.  Interestingly though, the fathers of two of the players have taken it upon themselves to outline their plans in a letter to the Trump Organization – but try not to let that put you off completely from the outset before you hear the crux of the idea.

First of all, the two Dads in question are Albert, Albane’s father and Rick, father and caddy of Alexa Pano, who became an LPGA winner in 2023. They feel the twelve women’s tours currently recognised in the Rolex Rankings would be better served, financially and otherwise, if they united under one umbrella with a four-tier system.

As they explained in their letter:  “No longer would players have to choose between different tours; instead, they would be competing in one unified system, with global rankings determining eligibility for the biggest events.”

The top players in the world would be eligible to play in Tier A which would offer purses of $US10 million and these would include the five majors.  Next, in Tier B, would be the next-ranked players competing in tournaments with purses from US $3 – 5 million;  Tier C would have purses of around $1 million with Tier D (a developmental level) offering prize funds of roughly $500,000.

This is broadly following the blueprint of women’s tennis but it is early days indeed and it would take some convincing to persuade the hugely successful Korean and Japanese tours to give up their autonomy when the majority of their players LIKE playing near their homes.  I’m not sure they’d support a move to a global office.  In all likelihood the realisation of this sort of tour would need Saudi money to fund it, if not completely then certainly a large proportion of it, and this is still a contentious issue in many quarters.

It’s only now we are beginning to see the extent of the wider ripple effects of the LIV/PGA Tour split and it is not a huge surprise the women are becoming discontented watching on, as they are, from the sidelines, as the money for the men reaches astronomical heights while they remain very much in the halfpenny place by comparison.  With  still no reconciliation between the factions in men’s golf perhaps the two Dads judged this to be an appropriate time for the self-proclaimed dealmaker to be enticed into the fold.

It’s obvious which side of Donald Trump they are appealing to with these remarks in their letter:  “Beyond just creating a better product, this would be a legacy-defining move, one that cements The Trump Organization as the driving force behind the transformation of women’s professional golf. It would showcase your commitment not only to the sport, but also to championing women’s athletics on a global scale.

“The time for change is now.”

Will he bite?  Perhaps.  Trump ‘s eldest granddaughter, Kai, is a 17-year old high school student who will be playing college golf for the University of Miami next autumn after her expected summer graduation.  Kai is one of those student-athletes making quite a pile of money from NIL (name/image/likeness) deals having just signed a $1.2 million contract with Taylor Made – and that’s not her only income stream from NIL.  So, perhaps there’ll be a smidgeon of family interest that may encourage the president to spare five minutes from all his other endeavours.  We shall see.

The women’s tours may have a decent structure in mind but they are courting dangerous bedfellows.  Why not sit back and wait for the dust to settle as it eventually will?

Then they might just be a position to make sounder judgements.  Watch this space.

I really must start this week’s missive with a big thank you to all of you who sent in such lovely comments about last week’s blog when I irrevocably drew the line under my playing days.  So many of you corresponded privately with me as well, detailing your own personal stories and I thank you for that.  I don’t take it lightly and feel privileged you shared them with me.

However, onwards we go and this week I’m tapping away on the keyboard out in Tenerife where hubby and I have two weeks to enjoy the sun, sea, lava and hiking.  And no, the borrowed collapsible Nordic walking poles didn’t quite make it – this learner couldn’t collapse them sufficiently to fit into the suitcase, so they are holidaying peacefully at home.

It’s been a good week for the Irish, hasn’t it?  It’s always satisfying to start off with a victory in the Six Nations rugby although it took a worryingly long time for the boys in green to stamp their authority on an aggressive English side that for the first time in history was featuring twins, Tom and Ben Curry.  This was of particular interest to me as they are the sons of the headmaster of the secondary school in Malpas, three miles from where we live, and I couldn’t help but want the boys to do well – just not TOO well.

My wish was granted and I was pleased also to have a happy husband as Scotland came out on the right side against Italy, who are no mugs and absolutely not to be taken for granted.

Who knows what this weekend will bring?  Scotland versus Ireland at Murrayfield will be tense for this household and assuredly we won’t both be rejoicing come the final whistle.

The pictures from Pebble Beach are always spectacular and it was a feast of watching for me as Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry finished first and second respectively in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.  Both had had holes-in-one on the Thursday, Rory at Spyglass and Shane at Pebble’s scenic 7th hole, and they contested down the stretch on Sunday till Rory’s eagle at the 14th pretty much sealed the deal for him.

A closing 66 gave the Co Down man a two-shot cushion over Lowry whose stout effort of a 68 secured him second place on his own.  He admitted to being proud of his resilience out there when he hadn’t his best golf for a stretch and he was determined not to hand the title to close friend Rory, but to make him work for it.

He also summed things up succinctly:  “When players like Rory McIlroy turn up with their ‘A’ game, they’re pretty much impossible to beat.  I thought he was great out there.”

So, that now leaves all Rory fans agonisingly analysing his every move in the (interminable) lead up to Augusta.  Has he won too early in the season?  Will he go off the boil?  We certainly can’t have him peaking too early.  How many tournaments will he schedule in over the next eight to ten weeks?

For the uninitiated  (or let’s be totally honest here, the more sensible among us who do not stress over these things) these frantic musings are because if Rory, no WHEN Rory, wins The Masters at Augusta he will become only the sixth player in the history of the game to have scooped all four major titles.  For a wee girl from Norn Ireland like me to see a wee boy from Norn Iron like him achieve that would be beyond huge.  I might even die happy.

Rory has been stuck on only needing The Masters title to win the Career Grand Slam since 2014 so the last decade’s lead in to Augusta has been a fraught time for his fans, if not for him.  He has tried every kind of preparation – from resting the week before to playing the week before;  from arriving at the venue early to doing his preparation weeks before and coming in late.  You name it, he’s tried it and so far nothing has resulted in him slipping on the coveted green jacket.

And why am I talking about this in early February, for goodness sake?  I suppose because I became irrevocably invested in him back in 2007 at Royal County Down when as a 17-year old he coughed up a big lead in one of his Walker Cup foursomes matches.  He struggled through the interview and then, with the cameras off, fell into my arms in tears.  And for the last 11 years this lad has stood at the precipice of true greatness in the game.

Just take that final step Rory……

Leona Maguire, Ireland’s trailblazing female touring professional has also had a nice little start to herself  in this 2025 season.  A ninth place finish in the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions in Orlando will provide a solid confidence boost after an iffy year, by her standards, last year.  She closed out her second round with five consecutive birdies and I listened to her post-round interview.

Boy, did she take me by surprise!  It was funny, informative, relaxed, confident, unguarded – a million miles from the shy, slightly suspicious individual of only a couple of seasons back.  She is, after all, now 30 years of age and has been a wonderful ambassador for the women’s game in Ireland.

Alongside Stephanie Meadow she has inspired a new flood of Irish players joining various tours in 2025.  Annabel Wilson, Sara Byrne and Anna Foster have already taken the leap and will be followed later in the year by Beth Coulter and Aine Donegan. With Olivia Mehaffey and Lauren Walsh already on tour the Emerald Isle is better represented than ever before.

And to think I was the first Irish player ever to join the ladies’ European Tour……..

I can hardly believe it.

They tell me that’s it’s an age thing:  wondering where the time goes.  How on earth can it be singing again when I haven’t even put the song sheets away?  Surely the last session was only yesterday?  No?  It really was a week ago.  That means it must be tai chi in the evening.  Surely not already?

What a hopeless witness I’d be.  Where were you on the evening of the 4th?; the afternoon of the 31st?; yesterday morning?  I wouldn’t have a baldy (aka a bloody clue).  “I’ll have to look at my diary, see if there’s a clue in there.”  Of course, there’s no guarantee that I’ll have noted down anything of relevance and I’d be on the list of likely suspects right away.    My only hope would be that Poirot wouldn’t take long to realise that I hadn’t the nous to be even a minor criminal.

A week having whizzed by, it’s now blog night again and a friend, a fellow Spurs sufferer, said she hoped I’d got the blog done and dusted because “we couldn’t be doing with all that bad language on a Friday morning….”   The reason for her concern was that our tottering Totspurs were on duty again in the Europa League, at home to Elfsborg, from Sweden and at the moment there’s no guarantee that we’d beat anybody’s under-10s let alone a team of adults.  Even Swedes who’ve been on their winter break for weeks.

As time ticked on – and we know how fast it goes – and the score stayed at nil-nil, with Spurs doing all the attacking and getting nowhere and the opposition having a good chance to go ahead….Well, you can imagine the anxiety in the Davies household and I had the asterisks at the ready *****

Then, lo, the kids arrived from the bench and scored:  Dane Scarlett first, then a quite brilliant effort from Damola Ajayi, making his debut and, to top it off, a third in the last minute from Mikey Moore, who’d played the whole match and didn’t want to be upstaged by his mates from the club academy.  Three-nil.  Not so easy-peasy but glorious nonetheless.  Of course, Brentford away on Sunday, Liverpool away on Thursday and Aston Villa away on Sunday week aren’t fixtures designed to improve our season but a boost is a boost.

In a way I’m sorry I wasn’t there but on a cold, frosty night, with the log burner blazing (guilt there of course; am I ruining my lungs and my neighbours’ and the planet?) and a friend’s Sky Go showing the match, I didn’t miss the train trip getting me home in the early hours.  Wimp?  Perhaps.

It doesn’t mean I’ll get to bed any earlier, what with all the moaning and groaning, then screeching and cheering at the footie; and keeping an eye on the Seville oranges simmering as I attempt to make marmalade, following a friend’s slightly complicated but guaranteed delicious recipe; and being distracted by the first day of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, with both Shane (7th at Pebble, come on!) and Rory (15th at Spyglass, slam dunk!) having a hole-in-one.  Let’s hope it’s a good omen for Ireland against England in the Six Nations in Dublin on Saturday….though I sense more sporting angst on the horizon….

Earlier on in the day, for some unknown reason – it was a beautiful, bright, sunny, chilly winter’s morning and I had a lovely walk in the park with Sue and the sainted Alice, then strolled to the Bore Street Bakery to stock up on sourdough muffins – I felt a bit blah.  Who knows why.  So I treated myself to a coffee in one of Lichfield’s many coffee shops and had what a friend calls “a bit of a relax”.

If truth be told, most of my life is a bit of a relax and then a WhatsApp came in from a friend and it reminded me of the last time I’d stayed at hers and left my passport under the mattress and only realised just before boarding the ferry home.  Fortunately I had some sort of photo ID so all was well.

Well, thinking about that semi debacle made me laugh and the  blue mood was gone.   I looked around and realised, yet again, just how lucky I am.  Football team apart.  Although, when I got home there was a programme on radio 4 about Roman Abramovich and, really, every single one of Chelsea’s trophies should be returned, tainted as they are by an oligarch’s ill-gotten gains….

Mind you, I know Spurs fans who would happily accept any old oligarch, Saudi prince or multi-billionaire willing to splash the cash if it meant winning something.

Talking of money, Holywood’s second finest, Tom McKibbin, has headed off to LIV for reasons best known to himself and his advisers.  The sum mentioned was £5 million, which can’t possibly be right, surely.  He shared sixth place at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic and won nearly 285,000 Euro.  He had a full card on the US PGA Tour, with millions of dollars on offer and that is now off his schedule indefinitely.   There are other complications to joining LIV, including the lack of world ranking points, so in the general scheme of sporting things, five mill is small change.  Interesting decision.

Finally, and belatedly, many congratulations to the multi-talented Lewine Mair on receiving the 2025 PGA of America Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.  There’ll be more, much more, on this at a later date.

 

 

 

 

Hello everybody.  Welcome back and happy new year.  Who knows what on earth we bloggers will find to talk about in 2025 but let’s hope it’s a bit of a magical mystery tour.  It’ll certainly be a mystery to me and is well-nigh guaranteed to be baffling to a lot of you.

For a start, I’m already a gibbering wreck and exhausted having suffered through my struggling, depleted Totspurs clinging on for a much-needed win away to Hoffenheim in the Europa League.  We’re everybody’s favourite opponent at the moment – perhaps just pipped by Manchester United, who are even worse – because as the opposition you’re pretty well guaranteed a goal or two at least.  Even shot-shy Everton scored three against us, so I had to fall back, yet again, on Dad’s mantra:  Every result makes somebody happy….Aaagh.  Gritted teeth out and fixed.

I have friends, eminently sensible people whom I envy immensely, who have no interest whatsoever in football.  They just can’t understand people’s obsession with a game that leaves them cold.  There’s no explaining why it sometimes lights up my life; often plunges me into deep gloom; makes me screech like an enraged banshee; and has me yakking for hours on end to fellow tragics.  I tell myself I don’t really care but the truth is that too often I do.  Ridiculous.

The best day of all, though, was when Spurs came to Tamworth – and I was there.  It was so exciting and as a fellow Spurs/Tamworth supporter said of the Tottenham big names within arm’s length of the fans as they trekked round the ground on the way to the Portakabin that barely passes muster as a dressing room:  “They all look like ordinary blokes when you see them here.”

They could have lost too but brought on some of the big guns in extra time, to wit Son and Kulusevski – the Tamworth players, tiring after an immense effort, had a laugh about that – and won 3-nil in the end.  It’s another local derby for me next, Aston Villa away, so we probably won’t be going any further in the FA Cup this year.

Thanks to Andy Farrington of Bradley Scott Windows for making good on his promise, made on Colin Murray’s show on  BBC 5 Live, to look after me and get me a ticket, £38 well spent.  His company, named after his sons, are big sponsors of Tamworth FC and the company name was proudly displayed on the front of the very smart shirts for millions of ITV viewers to see.

That match was my third in eight days – Newcastle (2-1 to them), Liverpool (1-nil to us, miracle), then the mighty Lambs.         Last weekend I went to Tamworth again, when there was a respectable crowd of 1400-odd (there were about 4,000 at the Spurs game) and we (!) won 3-0 against the Pilgrims of Boston United.  COYL.  Come on you Lambs.

My golf has been a little curtailed by a slightly dodgy left knee and my increasing dislike of manky, grey, damp, bone-chilling weather.  A few swift holes, then in for a hot cuppa, that’s my preference at this time of year.  A wee carry bag, six clubs and you can scuttle round almost without noticing the cold.  We’re playing a revised layout at the moment and it plays merry hell with filling in the scorecard.  Starting at the 6th is straightforward enough.  So you fill in 6, 7, 8, 9.  Then you play 13, 14, 12, 10, 11, 15 and 16 and on in – or if you have any sense you head in and avoid 17, a long, boring, undistinguished nothing of a hole.

There’s been an alert from Portstewart Golf Club that all three courses and the clubhouse will be closed tomorrow, quiz postponed and everybody advised to hunker down in the face of Storm Éowyn.  It’s expected to be one of the most dangerous storms on record in Ireland and the UK won’t be immune.  Keep safe everybody.  Might be a day for bridge in a low building built on solid foundations.

Mega bucks seem to be the order of the day at the top end of professional golf but lower down, at the grass roots, there’s been a wonderful fund-raising effort in aid of Ireland’s National Breast Cancer Research Institute.  The Play in Pink initiative is supported by clubs and societies running charity golf days to raise money for the NBCRI.  The players play in pink and I’m delighted to wear my buff, designed by Lucy Torrey and a pressie from Mary McKenna, at every opportunity.

In the general scheme of things, given the state of the world  – wars, floods, famines, storms, devastating forest fires – losing a trophy can’t rank that highly but a precious possession is just that.  Precious.  Mo Martin, who won the then Ricoh Women’s British Open at Royal Birkdale in 2014, her only big title, kept the trophy at her mum’s house in California and that family home, full of memories, was destroyed by the recent fires.  Fortunately, the people and pets made it to safety but everything else was reduced to rubble.  Sickening.  Devastating.  Hard to take in.  Rebuilding will be a long, slow process.