With a withering third-round finish, wondrous world No.1 Jeeno Thitikul might have snatched away Australian golf star Hannah Green’s chances of opening her 2026 season with a bang.<\/p>\n
As many of Thitikul’s challengers faltered down the stretch on Saturday, Green hung tough to eke out a three-under-par 69 in Pattaya to stay in the mix at the $US1.8 million LPGA Thailand.<\/p>\n
At 15 under in her first start of the year, Green is tied for seventh entering championship Sunday but will need to reel in not only Thitikul, from five shots back, but a batch of other women’s golf superstars to claim a sixth LPGA Tour title.<\/p>\n
Showing her class, Thitikul rammed in three straight birdies – including on two of the toughest three holes on the Old Course – to close her round of 66 and soar to 20 under par.<\/p>\n
After starting Saturday’s moving day two strokes off the lead, Thitikul had six birdies and just one bogey in a seemingly single-minded pursuit of a hugely popular home-town triumph.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As solid as she appears, having recorded only one bogey through 54 holes, Thitikul has some capable pursuers hot on her tail.<\/p>\n
With a third-round 65, South Korean Hyo Joo Kim is solo second at 18 under, one stroke ahead of Japanese halfway leader Somi Lee, American Allisen Corpuz and Japan’s Chizzy Awai.<\/p>\n
Finding it impossible to follow up her blazing second-round 61, Lee steadied after a horror front nine to post an even-par 72, while Corpuz (67) and Awai (68) made significant moves up the leaderboard to within three shots of the Saturday night leader.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s former world No.1 and future Hall of Famer Lydia Ko is outright sixth at 16 under following an up-and-down moving day 69.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Green stayed in contention, fellow Australian Grace Kim, with a disappointing round of 73, stumbled on the back nine to slip from tied 10th at the halfway mark to a share of 29th at eight under – a dozen shots adrift of Thitikul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a withering third-round finish, wondrous world No.1 Jeeno Thitikul might have snatched away Australian golf star Hannah…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-494958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}