Matt Cooper in Finland

Last updated: 27th August 2010

FRIDAY

Looking for another exciting Finnish

This is the sixth running of the Finnair Masters. Two years ago local girl Minea Blomqvist triumphed to send the home crowds happy and last year Beatriz Recari completed victory with arguably the shot of the season.

She began her week with rounds of 65 and 64 to take control of the event only to be caught in the final round by Denmark's Iben Tinning.

No matter. In the first extra hole Recari holed a 4-iron from 161 metres to secure her maiden LET title.

If we have a conclusion half as dramatic as that we'll be in for an exciting Sunday.

Spicing it up

In the last few years Indian golf has grown in strength. First Jeev Milkha Singh became a strength on the European Tour, followed by half-Indian Daniel Chopra doing likewise on the PGA Tour.

In the meantime the likes of SSP Chowrasia, Shiv Kapur and Jyoti Randhawa added titles around the world.

Then last week Arjun Atwal - already a multiple winner on the European Tour - claimed a win on the PGA Tour: the first by a player representing India (Chopra flies the Swedish flag).

But what of the women? Smitri Mehra has played on the LET for a few years but the real breakthrough might be made by another player.

And that could be 19-year-old Sharmila Nicollet who has taken the small-scale Indian Tour by storm in the last two years - indeed last month she won the first two events of this season by 13 and 14 strokes!

As I discovered today she is the first to admit that the tour is not deep in talent, but you can only beat the opposition you are up against and to do so that comfortably has to show a certain ruthlessness.

Three years ago she played alongside Laura Davies as an amateur in an invitational event in her home city of Bangalore, but today was her first professional start outside India.

"I was a bit nervous," she said. "There are some high expectations back home about my trip here so perhaps I was thinking of that. But I relaxed after a poor start. I was four over par after eight holes but finished only five over par."

"I'm hoping to make the cut tomorrow. That is my first target and it will be a good step for my game.

"Now that I have done so well on the Indian Tour I need to make a move up to another level, I think. That will probably be on the Asian Tour first.

"I'm thinking of playing the LET Q-School but the reason is that I think it will demonstrate what level the game is at."

Her talent is all the more impressive because she doesn't come from a golf-mad family. Her uncles play a bit, but she largely took the game up out of personal interest and has been playing since she was 12-year-old.

She has also been inspired by Arjun Atwal's superb effort last week. "Even people who don't know about golf were talking about it," she said.

One day they might be getting that excited about Sharmila Nicollet.

The other first-timer

Nicollet wasn't the only LET debutant today - Russia's Galina Romitstrova was also making her first appearance on the European stage.

Unlike the Indian player, however, the 23-year-old didn't prepare with two wins but in the smoke of Moscow.

For most of August the peat bogs and forests around the Russian capital burned, sending toxic fumes and smog across a huge area. Visibility was poor and many took to walking around with face masks - hardly ideal conditions for practising golf.

She made a solid start to her round though. "I didn't really have too many nerves," she said, "Well, maybe on the first tee in front of the people ... all three or four of them."

The day didn't end so well as she collected a one shot penalty for an infringement, but she refused to blame it on her sister Uliana, who is carrying her bag this week.

Instead she pretended to hold Maria Verchenova responsible. "She's been helping me this week, showing me what happens at an event. But she didn't tell me about one shot penalties ..."

How do you explain a win?

Every week Golf365 attempts to discover exactly how or why a player won the previous week's events with our regular Winning Ways feature. The idea is that there must be something behind the victory, some clue that helps us understand this bizarre game.

But sometimes, perhaps, it really is a mystery.

That, at least, is what France's Virginie Lagoutte-Clement thinks after her win last week in the Scottish Open.

The tournament began early - on a Wednesday - and yet on the preceding Sunday evening she was admitting that her year had taken a turn for the worse.

She had played well until early July - indeed she had a putt on the final green in the Tenerife Open to force the winner Trish Johnson into extra holes.

Lagoutte-Clement said she was motivated in that early season by the desire to play in the Evian Masters, something she ultimately succeeded in doing.

However once she had missed the cut there her drive disappeared.

It wasn't helped by the fact that she then played the Ricoh British Open and the S4C Wales Championship of Europe on links courses. "I really don't like links golf very much," she told me today.

She missed the cut in both events, as well as in the Irish Open in between, to complete a run of four abbreviated weeks.

So she arrived in Scotland to play a links course, in no form and de-motivated.

How come she won then? "I don't know," she laughed. "I did like the look of the course when I saw it, because it was a bit more wooded than most links courses. And I played every shot as it came. But it was still weird and unexpected!"

Helsinki

I arrived in the Finnish capital city on Thursday afternoon and in just a few hours I managed to pack in an absurd amount of activities.

I caught the bus to my accommodation for the week (the hostel at the Olympic Stadium), walked into the city centre, survived a rain storm, watched a live brass band in the city centre gardens, watched another free live concert (this time by a rock band made up of members of the army), then stumbled across a bizarre activity called - absurdly - Cooper (it involves running as hard as you can for 12 minutes - I have no idea why 12 is the magic number), returned to the Olympic Stadium where I watched the Finnish and Swedish athletes warm up for today's annual athletics match, next I stood on a hill and watched HJK Helsinki play Besiktas in the Europa League (boring match, interesting punch-up in the crowd) and I concluded the day with some more live music, this time jazz in a small bar.