Aramco Team Series Singapore: The players looking to KO world No1 Lydia
It’s not all about Lydia Ko in Singapore, where the world No1 will be joined at the first Aramco Team Series event of the year by a field featuring seasoned winners and rising stars alike.
Ko’s LPGA Tour colleague Danielle Kang, the 2017 Women’s PGA Championship winner, will also be teeing it up at Laguna National Golf Resort Club from Thursday.
US Solheim Cup star Kang is looking to add to her six career titles and arrives off the back of a top-three finish at the HSBC Women’s World Championship at nearby Sentosa Golf Club.
Linn Grant, who swept to the Ladies European Tour order of merit in a stunning 2022 campaign, will be among the top prospects for an LET ‘home’ win.
The Swede, 22, won seven times last year, including at the Scandinavian Mixed, and has already registered one runner-up finish in four events since January.
Making Grant look like a relative veteran is German teenager Chiara Noja, who won the individual title at the Aramco Team Series Jeddah last year aged just 16.
Noja is set to mark her 17th birthday on Thursday by captaining her own team in Singapore, where she is seeking to build on third place on her last outing in South Africa.
Her win in Jeddah last year emulated Pia Babnik, who also won the title as a teen 12 months earlier, and the Slovakian is also competing at Laguna National.
Two-time LET winner Babnik, now 19, will be looking to kick-start her year, having missed the cut at all three of her tournaments so far in 2023.
England’s Lily May Humphreys could make it back-to-back wins, having landed her maiden LET victory at the Joburg Ladies Open two weeks ago.
The 21-year-old from Chelmsford, who also celebrated her birthday this week, has enjoyed a meteoric rise since turning pro in 2021.
Fellow Englishwoman Bronte Law is among a clutch of former Aramco Team Series winners looking to add another title in Singapore.
Law pipped compatriot Georgia Hall at the London leg last year and has thrived in the format, also finishing in the top five in Jeddah last year.
Manon De Roey, technically the defending champion at this event having won the first leg of the series last year in Bangkok, is also in the field of 78 professionals.
The Belgian is in good form, having recorded a trio of top-three finishes already this season on the Ladies European Tour, including at the Saudi Ladies International last month.
Olivia Cowan, a former winner of the team competition who finished second in the individual standings at the last event of the series in 2021, is among the other past champions in the field.
Joining the German in that respect is Dane Emily Pedersen, who did the team and individual double at the 2020 Saudi Ladies Team Invitational, which first trialled the format that would become the Aramco Team Series.