During a walk-cum-chat in her hometown of North Berwick, Scotland, last Wednesday, Catriona Matthew, who captained Team Europe to a 15-13 victory at the 2021 Solheim Cup at the Inverness Club, said her side had been lucky with its teams in recent years. Instead of having to make significant changes of personnel, their transition process has tended to be steady. So much so that she thinks that the 2023 team at Finca Cortesin in Spain will include a couple of changes at most.
Europe’s Ryder Cup men, meanwhile, are in a very different position. With four players older than 40 in the side that lost 19-9 at Whistling Straits, the expectation in most quarters is that their team list will make for dramatically different reading next time around.
Matthew said that her players, with an average age of just younger than 28 against the 34-plus of the Ryder Cup men, could only be classified as young: “Anna Nordqvist, Mel Reid and Carlotta Ciganda were the oldest in my side, but they were hardly old. … Anna is only 34, Mel 33 and Carlotta 31.” (As for the youngest members, they were Georgia Hall and Charley Hull who, at 25 apiece, have between them played in the match as many as eight times.)
“The trouble with experience is that it only works for so long in a Solheim Cup context. In my 30s, I revelled in the pressure of a tough match but, as I grew older, I didn’t look forward to the harder games with quite the same relish. I started to feel nervous.”
Catriona Matthew
In looking back across her own career, Matthew, who had nine Solheim Cups on her CV before she took on the captaincy, had no trouble in identifying that she was never better than between 2003 and 2013. Though she bagged three points out of four in each of 2015 and 2017, she was convinced that her optimum years coincided with her 30s.
“At that stage, everything was clicking,” Matthew said. “After turning professional later than some, I had by then amassed plenty of experience, while all the work I’d done over the years was paying off.
She stressed that she did not know if it was the same for others, but things had certainly been that way for her.
Now 52, but 39 when she won the 2009 British Women’s Open, Matthew is playing in the Aramco Team Series in New York this week and will attend the final stage of the Aramco events in Saudi Arabia before the end of the year.
Last week, following on from a visit to the Ryder Cup where she could not have been more appreciative of the tribute which Pádraig Harrington paid to her captaincy in his opening address, she was warming up for a relaxing winter back home in East Lothian.
Matthew’s house boasts a magnificent view across the Forth to Fife. It is a view which, to Catriona, is no less appealing on the wildest of winter days than when, as applied on Wednesday afternoon, the sky is an uninterrupted blue.
Text messages to do with the Solheim Cup were at an end but there was the odd ping on the phone from daughters Katie and Sophie as they set off on the train from their Edinburgh school to North Berwick.
“What’s for supper?” came the first of them.
“Sausages!” returned their mum.
Of course, the girls had messaged her during the week of the match, with one of Katie’s questions, about her maths homework playing its part in keeping the European side nicely distracted on the eve of the contest. Team spirit kicked in to have everyone contributing her “two pence worth” as to how the problem could best be tackled.
That the different nationalities – there were eight represented in the 12-strong side – all had their own ways of negotiating the maths is much the same as in golf itself. In fact, it was at this point in our conversation that Matthew and her husband, Graeme, brought up the subject of how the different course rating system used in Europe and America is helping their girls progress more quickly than ours in the UK.
Why, they wanted to know, do we allow women a more generous par for a course than the men?
“Add in the advantage they get from forward tees, and they end up with a double bonus,” Matthew said. “Too many (UK) players get one of those ridiculously low handicaps and end up thinking they are better than they are.”
The above could well have something to do with the profusion of Europeans waiting in the wings alongside such as Scotland’s Hannah Darling and Louise Duncan to make Solheim sides of the not-too-distant future.
Though Matthew emphasised that no-one can be sure what will happen in the space of the next few years, she unreeled the following list of European names: Sweden’s Maja Stark, Finland’s Sanna Nuutinen, Germany’s Esther Henseleit and Switzerland’s Albane Valenzuela.
Add in the likes of Stark’s compatriot, Linn Grant, France’s Pauline Roussin-Bouchard, Slovenia’s Pia Babnik and Germany’s Leonie Harm, and you have as talented a group of emerging youngsters as the Continent of Europe has produced for some time.
Top: Catriona Matthew
E-Mail Lewine