My overriding feeling when I was watching the last day’s play of the AIG Women’s Open from Royal Lytham and St Annes was that the players were tired.  Tired of battling with a recalcitrant opponent who kept throwing unnerving bounces into the carefully-honed spokes of their manicured golf games.

Everything about golf nowadays seems to be wrestled in to neat little columns and boxes of statistics, percentages and probabilities but that information isn’t what equips players to cope with a test of writhing, bone-hard fairways that all seem destined to deliver your 1.68 inch golf ball into a sandy pot bunker that ordinarily would be miles away from your intended line or target area.

Add in to the mix that this was the women’s fifth major of the year, all of which occur in a thirteen-week span – and three of those majors have taken place in the last four tournaments.  The mental edge and sharpness needed to deal with the stress of these high-pressure weeks is immense and the unpredictability of a links test proved a step too far for some of the competitors.  No wonder they were weary.

This clumsy scheduling does the women and the women’s game a disservice.  Cease this shoehorning of majors into unsuitable time frames and give the season a more rhythmical flow to it.  Much like a beautiful piece of music, or indeed, the design of a great golf course, the programme of events should ebb and flow to high points throughout the entire campaign.  That’s the path to the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts.  I think the sponsors would welcome it.  And the players deserve it.

I watched most of the television broadcast on Sunday and, save for the last hour or so, it was a difficult watch.  Mistake after mistake from the players and seemingly every putt failing to reach its target made for turgid viewing.  I remarked to whomever would listen that it must be a nightmare to commentate on – there was no spark on the course and no energy in the box.  I’ve experienced many a commentary box when there’s absolutely nothing happening.  It makes for a long afternoon.

The bright point came when Esther Henseleit holed a raker across the last for an unlikely birdie which forced a play-off with the colourful, smiley Shiho Kuwaki (top picture), she of the quirky swing.  It was Kuwaki who ultimately triumphed.  The play-off was exciting but more so because it signalled the impending conclusion of a long day and, at last, a result.

And so, for the second consecutive year we have a Japanese winner of the AIG Women’s Open, Miyu Yamashita having triumphed at Royal Porthcawl last year.  And for the second year running we have a winner who does not play on the LPGA tour.  In fact, Japanese home-based players have claimed this title three times in the last eight years.  It would be misleading to suggest that they play a lighter schedule than that provided by the American tour but in a season that typically will have 38 tournaments, thirty to thirty-four of them are only 54 holes.  The distances travelled are also significantly shorter so most Japanese players sleep in their own beds every week for at least a night or two.

These differences can add up to significantly less mental fatigue at this stage of the season – and that was the skill required to cope with a test such as Royal Lytham.

It’s not only players who need to recharge their batteries and reignite their enthusiasm – it’s fans and spectators as well and I’m looking forward to a quieter August on that front as we build towards two of my favourite events of the year – the Walker Cup and the Solheim Cup.

The former is in Lahinch in Ireland and the GB&I team will be finalised very shortly but Anna Nordqvist, the European Solheim Cup team captain was on hand on Monday to deliver the news of her four picks for the match at Bernardus in the Netherlands.

Never a straightforward decision for any captain, she had to await the outcome of the Women’s Open to see who her automatic selections would be.  When Esther Henseleit holed that huge putt on the 72nd green she removed herself from one list to another in the selection criteria, transferring from qualifying on the world ranking list to qualifying on the LET Solheim Cup points list.  This effectively knocked out Switzerland’s Chiara Tamburlini who  had occupied a spot on that latter list for almost all the qualifying period.  Relatively uninspiring recent form resulted in the captain plumping for Mimi Rhodes as one of her picks instead of the unfortunate Tamburlini.

It’s utterly amazing how one shot from a particular player can and does affect the fortunes of others.

So, it was a joyous phone call that Anna made to Mimi Rhodes on Sunday evening to inform her of her decision but a ghastly one she had to make to Chiara.  The other three receiving life-affirming calls were Ireland’s Leona Maguire who will be playing in her fourth consecutive match and rookies Julia Lopez Ramiriez of Spain and France’s Nastasia Nadaud.  They join Charley Hull, Carlota Ciganda, Céline Boutier, Lottie Woad, Linn Grant, Maja Stark, Henseleit and Nanna Koerstz Madsen on the roster for Europe for the 2026 Solheim Cup.

With the match taking place in five weeks’ time and many of the players playing the next three weeks in America it’ll be upon us, and them, before we know it.  It’ll be back to managing energy levels and understanding that high emotion depletes those stores more quickly than anything else.

Players captains and fans – we all need to be fresh for what I hope will turn out to be an epic contest.

Glory be!

This week we are celebrating the fiftieth playing of the Women’s British Open and the world’s best have gathered at glorious Royal Lytham & St Annes to battle it out for the final major title of the year.  I know there are some special celebrations planned and Jenny Lucas, formerly Lee Smith, the inaugural winner of the championship, will be in attendance.  She won as an amateur at Fulford back in 1976, in sun-baked, fast-running conditions which were a sore trial to most of us on those tree-lined fairways.

Yes indeed – I was there.  Actually, my memory is pretty good about golf dates and so on, but until I looked up the records on the aigwomensopen website I didn’t recall that I’d played in this inaugural championship.  I had remembered the tournament as being the British Amateur Strokeplay championship, which, alas, is now defunct.

Looking back it is understandable that my brains were a little scrambled as to the exact tournament I was teeing it up in.  It was a life-changing week for me as Canadian player, Pam Johns, recruited both me and my Welsh pal Lisa Isherwood for Lamar University in Texas.   The upshot was that in January 1977 we became the first women from GB&I (in fact, from Europe, I think) to sally forth to America on a golf scholarship.  It subsequently opened the floodgates across the Atlantic and I must admit to feeling a wee bit of pride in being the first to take those big steps.

I don’t, however, have a great deal of pride in recalling any of my performances in the Women’s Open.  I’m not sure that I made many weekends in the fifteen or so times I teed it up but boy, did we have fun.  There was that long stretch of years – seven in a row I believe – when we were hosted by Woburn and there were such enormous crowds streaming in to the venue that the traffic jams reached all the way back to the M1.  Heady stuff indeed.

Each year the pro-am dinner was held in the sumptuous surroundings of the Long Room at Woburn Abbey and we were all dressed to the nines.  There was one unforgettable moment when a visiting American pro didn’t want to sit with her pro-am team at the dinner and the tournament controller felt it necessary to step in.

When she was asked why she was averse to sitting with them, she declared in a voice that rang out down the room,  “I’ve spent more than five f…..g hours with them on the golf course and that’s more than enough for anyone!”

I looked across at her team of amateurs, at least two of whom were golf journos and who were sitting at my table.  They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said to the rest of us.  “Well, she has a point!”  They then poured another glass of wine each and proceeded to have a great evening with not a bit of offense taken.  It was hilarious because she voiced exactly what so many of us felt on occasions.

I was there when Laura Davies, Ali Nicholas, Corinne Dibnah, Karrie Webb, Helen Alfredsson and Lotta Neumann all won.  Aside from the two Aussies, Webb and Dibnah, the others went on to become stalwarts of many, many European Solheim Cup teams.  One victory I’d love to have witnessed in person was that of another Aussie, Karen Lunn, who had a runaway victory in 1993.  She was supreme.  I watched that one on telly having had had back surgery a few weeks earlier.

I’ll be watching this one on telly too – the old back is misbehaving yet again which makes the travel a tad tricky.  There is so much that is different about the championship now yet somehow there is so much the same.  The prize money is huge, of course, compared to our day and the players are serious athletes whereas we were just beginning to embrace the gym, thanks mostly to the arrival of one Mr Woods.  There are more international players in the field now and the players have their own support teams of physios, mental skills and performance coaches as well as putting, short game and long game coaches.  It’s quite a caravan.

When it comes down to it, however, it’s all still about getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of shots.  There are more players capable of winning now – the strength in depth is unreal, but I’d back any of the winners I’ve mentioned from my time to more than hold their own – and I haven’t even mentioned Annika Sorenstam, perhaps the greatest of them all.  These players had more shots, were multi-dimensional in their creativity and were able to adapt their strategies to changing conditions.  Those were the questions asked of us in the course set-ups we faced.

Nowadays, the questions asked of the players have determined how they’ve evolved.  Power, strength and the ability to hit the ball a long way are hugely rewarded and often it’s better to be miles down and in the rough rather than further back and on the fairway.  Wedges with 60 degrees of loft or more are common so the equipment is more helpful in manufacturing and finessing shots.  We used to do that with 52 degrees of loft.

It’ll be interesting to see how Lytham is set up.  What is this week’s examination paper going to demand of the contestants?  We’ve had a similar sizzler of a summer to 1976 and that first championship but there’ll be no trees to trouble the players.  (Dad would be delighted – he was brought up in the west of Ireland at Rosses Point and felt there was no place for trees on any golf course!)  The key will surely be the bunkers and the avoidance thereof, so strategy is going to play a huge part, potentially nullifying the bomb and gouge game.

It’ll be fascinating, it’ll be exciting and it’ll be life-changing for someone.  The last two Opens at Lytham have resulted in home winners in Catriona Matthew and Georgia Hall – a hat trick would be nice.

Play away please.