The Amateur Championship is scheduled for June 19-24 in England
This week, Team India, comprising Yuvraj Singh, Shaurya Bhattacharya, and Milind Soni, travel to England courtesy the IGU, to participate in the historic Amateur Championship hosted by the R&A at the famous Royal Lytham & St Anne’s course ( venue of several Open Championships) in England from June 19-24.
All three players are part of the recently announced IGU National squad. Shaurya Bhattacharya, from New Delhi, holds the top spot among amateurs in the IGU rankings and has played two events in Australia and 3 in South Africa for valuable international exposure along with Milind Soni of Hyderabad
Yuvraj Singh, from Panchkula, recently clinched the IGU’s Andhra Pradesh Amateur Championship in Hyderabad and played in Australia and the Asia Pacific Team Championship (Nomura Cup) in November 2022.
The Amateur Championship in the UK, started in 1885, is one of the biggest and most prestigious amateur championships in the world which has winners like Bobby Jones, Sergio Garcia and José María Olazábal.
The tournament is contested by 288 players over stroke play and then the top 64 go into match play, the winner secures exemptions into The (British) Open and the US Open, and by tradition, an invitation to play in the Masters Tournament.
During the previous week, Chandigarh’s Mannat Brar and Mumbai’s Nishna Patel , who recently finished 2nd in the Asia Pacific Juniors in Manila, represented India in The Women’s Amateur Championship at Prince’s course in Kent, just outside London. Both girls failed to go beyond the strokeplay stage missing the cut by a wide margin which shows how difficult the Indian players find playing after only one practice round on the undulating windswept seaside links courses in the UK which are a world apart from conditions in India and Asia.
Unless Indian teams going to play seaside links golf get 3 days to get used to the alien conditions, they might as well not waste their time travelling as year after year, we see the same result of the top Indian boys and girls missing the cuts at the big UK championships, despite being competitive in Asian conditions.
Credits:-
Photo – R&A