Lottie Woad shot a level-par first round to lie five shots off the Women’s Open lead jointly held by Japanese duo Eri Okayama and Rio Takeda.<\/p>\n
England’s Woad began as favourite at Royal Porthcawl, having won two events and narrowly missing out on a first major title in July.<\/p>\n
The 21-year-old, playing in her second tournament since turning professional, made lengthy birdie putts at the first and sixth holes as she reached the turn in level par.<\/p>\n
A superb approach to within four feet set up another birdie at the 14th and Woad also birdied the last to sign for a 72.<\/p>\n
However, she was unable to build any real momentum during her opening round and some solid putting for pars and bogeys prevented irretrievable damage to her tournament chances.<\/p>\n
“It was a bit mixed,” Woad said. “It’s one of those rounds that could have got away from me so I am happy I hung in there.”<\/p>\n
Scoring was generally good on a breezy day when short bursts of rain punctured longer spells of sunshine at the links course in south Wales.<\/p>\n
Okayama, appearing at a Women’s Open for the first time since 2018, did not drop a shot after a bogey at the first hole and made six birdies in her round of 67.<\/p>\n
The only blemish on Takeda’s scorecard was a double-bogey seven at the ninth, with four birdies on the back nine putting her alongside Okayama at the top of the leaderboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lottie Woad shot a level-par first round to lie five shots off the Women’s Open lead jointly held…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-37052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}