Lydia Ko's meteoric rise to the top of women's golf has shown little sign of slowing down but the New Zealand teen was forced to take a back seat to a pair of former number ones at the LPGA Tour's HSBC Women's Champions in Singapore.
The 17-year-old, who has claimed back-to-back wins in Australia and New Zealand recently, put herself well in contention for a hat-trick of wins with a four-under 68 over the Serapong course as she finished two behind joint leaders Inbee Park and Yani Tseng.
Park, the former world No 1 before Ko rose to the top last month, made the most of cooler early conditions to fire a bogey-free six-under 66 to claim a tie for first place alongside another former global leader Tseng, who is showing glimpses of a return to form after a two-year slump.
The 26-year-old from Taiwan dominated women's golf at the start of the decade, sitting on top of the world rankings for 109 weeks from 2011. A wretched run of results saw her slip to 90th a fortnight ago but a morale-boosting second place finish in Thailand last week has kick-started a resurgence.
Catriona Matthew, the 2009 Women's British Open champion from North Berwick, opened with a level-par 72 but Paula Creamer, this week's defending champion, could only muster a 74 and shares 51st place in the 63-player field.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article