Friday, May 7, 2010

Salonpas Cup Friday: Pressel Takes the Lead at -5, Tseng 3 Back

Scoring conditions remained extremely challenging in the 2nd round of the Salonpas Cup, but you wouldn't know it from looking at Morgan Pressel's scorecard. On a day when par was a great score and most of the players who went relatively low the day before blew up (and not in a good way), she shot a 5-birdie 68 to take a 3-shot lead on Ya Ni Tseng into the weekend.

Let's take a look at how the top 10 and notables stack up after 36 holes before going into more detail:

1st/-5 Morgan Pressel (71-68)
2nd/-2 Ya Ni Tseng (69-73)
3rd/-1 Mihoko Iseri (68-75)
T4/E Young Kim (74-70), Teresa Lu (72-72), Miki Saiki (70-74), Mayu Hattori (68-76)
T8/+1 Sakura Yokomine (74-71), Hiromi Mogi (73-72), Hyun-Ju Shin (72-73), Mie Nakata (70-75)

T12/+2 Nikki Campbell (73-73)
T14/+3 Seon Hwa Lee (73-74), Inbee Park (72-75), Ji-Hee Lee (72-75), Bo-Bae Song (71-76)
T20/+4 Ai Miyazato (76-72), Akane Iijima (75-73)
T22/+5 Sophie Gustafson (77-72), Yuri Fudoh (75-74), Rui Kitada (74-75), Maiko Wakabayashi (74-75), Tamie Durdin (74-75), Rikako Morita (74-75), Eun-A Lim (70-79)
T29/+6 Yukari Baba (78-72), Mi-Jeong Jeon (76-74), Ayako Uehara (76-74), Shinobu Moromizato (75-75), Ritsuko Ryu (72-78), Na-Ri Lee (70-80)
T37/+7 Hee Kyung Seo (77-74), Na-Ri Kim (76-75), Akiko Fukushima (75-76), Sun-Ju Ahn (74-77), Erina Hara (73-78), Yun-Jye Wei (73-78), Momoko Ueda (71-80)
T50/+8 Ah-Reum Hwang (76-76), Miho Koga (74-78)

MC: Chie Arimura (82-71), Saiki Fujita (78-75), Eun-Hee Ji (76-77), Ji-Woo Lee (75-78), Esther Lee (73-81), Li-Ying Ye (77-77), So-Hee Kim (80-75), Kaori Aoyama (79-76), Jae-Hee Bae (77-78), Yuki Ichinose (76-80), Asako Fujimoto (84-76)

Lots of interesting scorecards today. Ai Miyazato birdied 3 of her 1st 5 holes but 2 long par 4s got her on the back--she bogeyed the 14th and doubled the 18th to settle for her 72 that leaves her 9 behind Pressel. Nikki Campbell bogeyed 4 of her 1st 8 holes to start the back, but then made 5 birdies in her next 7 holes before finishing bogey-bogey to settle for her 2nd-straight 73 and fall 7 off the pace. Na-Ri Lee started on the back and bogeyed 8 of her 1st 9 holes to fall completely out of contention. Chie Arimura made 4 birdies to bounce back from her opening 82, but her 3rd bogey of the day, on the long par-3 13th, was the one she couldn't recover from--she parred out the rest of the way to miss the cut by a shot.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but I don't have time to go into any more detail. The key question for me is, with scores yo-yoing so much in the 1st 2 rounds, will Pressel and Tseng fall prey to the course and conditions on moving day or will they further separate themselves from the field?

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