As the top-ranked players on the European team, Lottie Woad and Charley Hull said they expected to play in all five Solheim Cup matches.
They couldn’t have foreseen the results.
With two days in the books at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, Woad and Hull have have been paired together in every session but have mustered only half a point.
Three losses and one tie. That’s disappointing math for the 7th- and 8th-ranked players in the world.
“Yeah, it was pretty frustrating,” Hull said.
“Just didn’t make any putts,” Woad added.
It was late Saturday, and the two were fresh off a double dose of defeats. In morning foursomes, they’d been drubbed 6 and 5 by Alison Lee and Lauren Coughlin. In afternoon fourballs, Hull and Woad came closer, but no cigar. They fell 1 down to Yealimi Noh and Andrea Lee.
To hear Woad and Hull tell it, their dreary record thus far does not reflect the quality their play.
“I feel like we actually played pretty solid, to be fair, haven’t we?” Hull said.
“Yeah,” Woad said, “Yesterday in the fourball, we were like 10, 11-under and obviously it was a great match back and forth on that. And then I don’t think anyone would have beaten who we played this morning. They were 7-under through 14. So credit to them. Everyone’s played amazing when we’ve played them.”
On Saturday afternoon, Woad and Hull never led but they also never trailed by more than 2, and they forced the match to the final hole when Hull coaxed in a birdie on the par-4 17th. But on the 18th, needing a win to square the match, Hull drove it in the water and Woad left her birdie attempt short.
“I think today we didn’t hole many putts in the morning and all afternoon and that’s the difference,” Woad said. “People we played were holing 15-footers and we weren’t.”
Match-play can be like that. The results aren’t always a fair reflection of performance. But match-play can also lead to second guessing, and European captain Anna Nordqvist faced a hint of that on Saturday when she was asked what Woad and Hull needed to better in Sunday singles.
Not much, Nordqvist said.
“I think a lot of it is just for them to keep doing what they have been doing,” she said. “We’re playing the best players in the world from both teams, so it’s going to be some tough matches, going to be a lot of good golf not being rewarded. That’s just golf.”
On the bright side for the Europeans, the Swedish pairing of Maya Stark and Linn Grant have won all three of their matches. On Saturday, they were giant slayers, beating World No. 1 Nelly Korda and Allison Corpuz 3 and 2 in the morning before knocking off American stalwarts Megan Khang and Lauren Coughlin in the afternoon. The loss was Khang’s first in eight matches, and the first for Coughlin in her Solheim Cup career.
