Kristie Smith
Martina Gillen of Team Ireland was the best of four Irish players in the opening round of the Lalla Meryem Cup in Agadir, with a double bogey on the15th the only major problem, in her one under par round of 71, to hold a share of 5th place after round one - and trailing the leader by four shots.
Tara Delaney signed for a round 76 after carding a triple and double bogey on Thursday for a 4 over par total.
Rebecca Codd returned to action and suffered a tougher day signing a round that included 11 bogeys for a nine over par round of 81.
Hazel Kavanagh was three shots further adrift signing for 84 in her first tournament of the season.
Recent Pegasus New Zealand Women’s Open champion Kristie Smith continued her fine run of form with a five under par 67 on the opening day of the Lalla Meryem Cup in Morocco.
West Australian Smith, 22, is looking to capture a second consecutive title on the Ladies European Tour this week after her maiden LET win a month ago.
She carded six birdies and one bogey to hold the early clubhouse lead by two strokes at Golf du Soleil in Agadir and the course lived up to its name on a day of blazing sunshine.
Playing in temperatures of 36-37 degrees centigrade and in a hot breeze coming off the Sahara desert, Smith started with a bogey on the 10th after she caught a flier out of the rough and failed to get up and down, but she moved into a share of the lead with Frenchwoman Anne-Lise Caudal after posting back-to-back birdies on 14 and 15.
Smith picked up four more birdies on the front nine thanks to a hot putter. She holed a 20-footer from off the green at the par-five third, another from 50 feet down a slope on the par-four fifth and holed putts from six and 20 feet at the seventh and eighth holes respectively.
“I don’t think anyone was expecting the wind to be up like it was this morning and it’s hot as well. It’s definitely difficult out there and five under was a pretty good round. I got off to a pretty rough start, bogeyed the first but hung in there and made quite a few good putts,” Smith said.
She admitted that it helped having her boyfriend Geoff Collington on the bag, as he produces the official yardage books for the Ladies European Tour.
Smith said: “I’ve been here since Wednesday so I’ve been out there helping him and it’s different because you get to see kind of different angles on the golf course and some places where you don’t want to be.”
She said that she felt a low score was possible, as Frenchman Adrien Mörk shot 59 at Golf du Soleil in the second round of the 2006 Tikida Hotels Agadir Moroccan Classic on the European Challenge Tour, when the course was playing as a par 71, rather than a par-72 this week.
“For a longer hitter, definitely, because we can get to all the par-fives in two, especially when there is no wind. This morning I got to three of the four in the wind so longer hitters, you knock ‘em on in two and you can make a couple of eagles if you get the putts rolling. There is a low score: Geoff and I said that to each other when we came out here. There are definitely going to be some low scores if the wind doesn’t get up.”
Frenchwoman Caudal, the 2008 Portugal Ladies Open champion is also gunning for her second LET title and made a strong start with five birdies and two bogeys in her opening round.
She was pleased, despite the fact that she only hit one fairway. “It was really good today. It’s funny because I didn’t hit really well the ball. The driving, I hit only one fairway, so the fairways are really tricky and with this wind it is not easy to keep the ball on the fairway. I just tried to be patient and I hit the irons really well today so I’m pretty happy,” said Caudal.
Maha Haddioui, the only Moroccan in the field, playing on an invitation at her home golf course, opened with a two-over 74 and felt she coped well in the conditions.
“This is very windy compared to what we’re used to. Usually there is a little breeze in the afternoon but we don’t get this much wind. This is the wind coming from the Sahara but we usually don’t get that. On most of the holes it was really tough because usually the wind comes the other way: it comes from the sea. It was difficult,” said the 22-year-old professional, who hit her first golf balls on the range at Golf du Soleil aged 13 and lives only 300 metres from the course.
“It made me look at the course in another way because the problem we sometimes have with the course we know well is to play the shots automatically without really thinking about each and every shot. It pushed me into thinking of every shot individually and in a different way than I usually do.”
Other players in the hunt include Australian Sarah Kemp on three-under-par after 12 holes and a stroke further back are the German pair of Caroline Masson and Anja Monke, the champion at Mohammédia last year.
