Anirban Lahiri, Shubhankar Sharma and Aditi Ashok have enjoyed a good run so far in 2022
With the calendar having turned to June and two Majors in the books for both the men and the women, it seems like a good time to take a look at how the three Indian stars playing on major international tours, Anirban Lahiri, Aditi Ashok and Shubhankar Sharma have performed so far this season on the PGA, LPGA, and DP World Tours, respectively.
Anirban Lahiri
Lahiri might still be seeking his first win on the PGA Tour, but this is already his best season in terms of earnings. He has banked 2.87 million USD so far, which comfortably exceeds the 1.9 million USD he made in 2016-17, his previous high season earnings . It is also over three times as much as the 952,000 USD Lahiri made last season.
Of course, that’s primarily the result of his second-place finish at the USD 20 million Players Championship in March—his best ever finish on tour – for which he took home a cool 2.1 million USD.
The 34-year-old Lahiri also finished tied for sixth at the Wells Fargo Championship in May and has two other top-25 finishes from 19 events and made 10 cuts.
While Lahiri’s scoring average is up ever so slightly from last season – 71.07 compared to 70.98 – digging a little deeper into the numbers shows that he has improved his game significantly in certain key areas. His strokes gained off the tee has gone from 0.28 to 0.39 while his strokes gained around the green has jumped from 0.089 to 2.59. As a result his overall strokes gained tee to green has jumped from a negligible 0.077 to 0.228.
Where Lahiri needs to get better is his iron play. He currently has a negative 0.372 strokes gained for his approaches to the green, which puts him 179 th on tour.
In terms of the FedEx Cup rankings, Lahiri is currently 51 st and should qualify for the season ending Fedex Cup Playoffs with room to spare. He is also 25th on the money list for the season.
Aditi Ashok
Ashok’s heroic fourth-place at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo put golf on the sporting map in India. However, India’s top ranked female golfer has struggled to build on that performance so far this season on the LPGA. She started out well with two top-15 finishes in her first two events but has struggled since. A tie for 41 st is the 24-year-old’s best performance since then and she has missed the cut in three of the last six tournaments that she has played on the LPGA in which there was a cut (the LPGA Match Play does not have a cut).
Her scoring reflects that sequence of results. Since finishing 11-under in Thailand in mid-March, she has failed to finish under par in any of her subsequent events on tour. While she had six top- top finishes last season, she is still looking for her first top-10 this year.
Despite these results, Ashok is actually playing better than she did last year. She is hitting 81% of her fairways, up from 79% last season, and she is making more putts too. She currently ranks second on tour with 28.59 putts per round compared to 29.07. As a result, her scoring average is down from 72.13 (rank 100) to 71.83 (rank 73) as well but her results are yet to reflect this improvement. Hopefully that trend will change in the second half of the season.
In terms of earnings, Ashok has made 88,490 USD so far from 10 events compared to the 231,225 USD she earned last season from 19 events.
Shubhankar Sharma
It’s been a strange season for the 25-year old Sharma. He began the year with a bang, finishing tied for second in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, a Rolex Series event. But since then his best finish has been a tie for 13 th in Kenya in March and he has missed the cut in four of his last five tournaments.
Yet he still sits in 17 th place on the DP World European Tour rankings with 796.5 Tour points, having earned 694.5 in Abu Dhabi, and should comfortably qualify for the DP World Tour Championship at the end of the season in Dubai.
Yet there are troubling signs for Sharma’s game. His scoring average has risen from 70.35 to 72.23, a difference of almost two shots. Last season the tour average was 70.75, so Sharma was marginally better than the average pro. This year, however, he is above the tour average of 71.53.
Looking at Sharma’s underlying stats, he is hitting roughly the same number of fairways and greens as he did last year. Where there has been a change relative to the rest of the pros is in his putting. While he is averaging 1.75 putts per GIR, the same as last season, the tour average has dropped from 1.77 to 1.67, so Sharma has fallen behind. He is also averaging 29.41 putts a round compared to 28.69 putts a round last season, which suggests his short-game isn’t as sharp either.
Credits:-
Photo – Getty Images/ DP World Tour/ LET Flickr