Kraft Nabisco Championship: Top-ranked Tseng happy with first-round performance
The current world number one Yani Tseng displayed a stellar performance in the Kraft Nabisco Championship, as she fired a decent 68 in the first round to grab the third position on the leaderboard.
Tseng grabbed most of the attention at the Mission Hills Country Club, as she is one of the hot favourites for the major title.
Tseng gave a tough time to her rivals right from the start of the day and managed to pile up a big score.
Determined to atone for the lapses she made in the last edition of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, Tseng played calculated strokes on most of the holes.
Tseng lost to Stacy Lewis in the 2011 Championship. She put up a tough fight and came close to inflicting a defeat on Lewis, but lost momentum in the final moments of the tournament.
Analysts have said that Tseng’s performance in the first round of the Kraft Nabisco Championship is commendable and she appears to be in high spirits.
She kicked off the day by parring the first two holes and drained her first birdie on the par-4 third hole. The world number one found some holes tricky, but she managed to keep the pressure on her rivals.
Scoring six birdies helped Tseng strengthen her position on the leaderboard. Although she scored well enough to stay on the safe side, she recorded two bogeys on the difficult par-3 8th and the par-4 15th.
Tseng judged the ball tactfully on the 8th, but faltered due to a sloppy putt. Overall, her performance was satisfactory.
Speaking to the media about her magic performance in the first round of the major championship, the Taiwanese prodigy said that she made a solid strategy for the tournament, as she wanted to atone for the last defeat at the hands of Stacy Lewis.
She said that she put in a tremendous effort but made some careless mistakes in the final moments.
Tseng said the defeat proved lucky for her in a sense that it helped her fix her lapses, which will help her display a much improved game this year.
“That experience gave me lots of things that improved myself, last year through this year,” she said.
“I know my emotional control wasn’t very good. I was very stressed after I missed a putt, after I made a bad shot”.
Tseng recounted how she misjudged her putt that cost her the major title. She shared with the media that she was quite disappointed after messing up the event, but her instructor cooperated with her, helping her overcome lapses.
“But after that tournament, I had a little meeting with my team, my trainer, to see how much I can improve on the tournament, and I did after that. I learned how I can win in a tournament when I was leading on Sunday or when I was behind on Sunday,” Tseng
said.
Tags: