Five players with Solheim Cup experience, three former winners and five Andalusian players are the most important sporting highlights of the upcoming Andalucía Costa del Sol Open de España, a tournament of the European Professional Tour that will take place at the RCG Guadalmina (Málaga) between September 21 and 24 with the main sponsorship of Turismo de Andalucía, Turismo Costa del Sol and Mancomunidad de Municipios de la Costa del Sol Occidental.
Suzanne Pettersen, Georgia Hall, Florentyna Parker, Azahara Muñoz and Carlota Ciganda are the ones who bring Solheim Cup experience to a competition that looks to be spectacular, concentrating between them a good number of titles that makes them de facto main contenders for the title at stake.
Special mention for the Norwegian Suzann Pettersen, a true star of world golf, with 2 Majors, 15 victories in the PGA and 6 in the LET to her credit, and a fixture in the European Solheim Cup team since 2002.
The Nordic player will find serious opposition in Azahara Muñoz and Carlota Ciganda, the two great icons of Spanish women’s golf based on their great and repeated results in both the American and European Tours.
Among the Solheim Cup players are also two English players, the more mature Florentyna Parker, with three victories to her credit -the last of them, by the way, in Spain, in mid-April, at the Estrella Damm Mediterranean Ladies Open- and the promising young Georgia Hall, who has burst onto the continental golf scene with enormous force, adding two prestigious third places this season -at the World Ladies Championship and the Ricoh Women’s British Open- that give her maximum prominence.
Three players who already know what it means to win the Spanish Open
Also in the spotlight are those who have already won the Women’s Spanish Open, who come to the Malaga course with the intention of winning for the second time in a competition that has a kind of unwritten curse, which prevents its winners in this century to raise the trophy of champion again.
Azahara Muñoz, the local player par excellence, will nevertheless fight to repeat last year’s glorious experience, when she won in a spectacular final round against American Beth Allen.
In a similar situation are two South Africans, Lee-Anne Pace and Connie Chen, who in their time won the championship trophy. The former did so in 2013, at the Club de Campo Villa de Madrid, after beating Sweden’s Mikaela Parmlid by one stroke, while the latter also longs to inscribe her name on the coveted pedestal of the trophy of the Women’s Spanish Open – increasingly populated, by the way, by players of impressive renown – thanks to the magisterial performance exhibited in 2014 at Tenerife’s Costa Adeje in what was her first victory at the professional level.
As if there were not enough points of attention, special mention for those who are legends of the sport. Absent on this occasion the incomparable Laura Davies, the legendary protagonist is her English compatriot Trish Johnson, who with 17 victories in the LET to her credit is an example of professionalism for all those present.
Five Andalusian women, local flavor to the competition
At a closer level, it is necessary to highlight the participation of five Andalusian golfers in the framework of a Spanish representation that amounts to twenty players. At the top of the list is the omnipresent Azahara Muñoz, trained in her earliest childhood at the tournament’s venue, the RCG Guadalmina, to whom Noemí Jiménez and Laura Cabanillas also belong, young players of great projection and an example of professionalism and combativeness, respectively, another team, in this case Andalusian, completed by María Parra and Piti Martínez, local flavor on all four sides.
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