Fátima Fernández had a happy Friday on the second day of the Aramco Series in Riyadh and with a score of 62 strokes she presented her chances for the title with 18 holes remaining. The golfer from Santiago de Compostela completed a second round with 10 birdies, without errors and without taking advantage of two of the par 5s at the golf club in the capital of Saudi Arabia.
On the verge of 30 years old, Fernández has found the reward for suffering. Last year she was barely able to keep her card in the Ladies European Tour in extremis, after a season full of problems due to nerve ailments in her right elbow.
«When it was time to hit, I noticed a certain weakness in my fingers and I was not able to control the club, I felt like my hand was opening. The truth is that it took me a while to give importance to the injury because I had no pain. In the end, I ended up returning to Spain for treatment. I visited many doctors who were surprised at what could happen and offered me infiltrations as the main solution, which did not help much. In the end, a doctor did come up with the diagnosis: an entrapment of the radial and median nerve in the elbow. “He saw that the most opportune thing to solve the problem was to operate,” he told La Voz de Galicia.
This fall everything took a radical turn. After having won the Guardian Championship, in Alabama, scoring for the Epson Tour, the LPGA development league, the third she has achieved in her career, Fernández earned a place to stay on the great world circuit. Now, less than two months later, she is aiming to win the first tournament of her career on the Ladies European Tour. Three strokes behind the Slovenian Pia Babnik, a 20-year-old talent, who has already won two LET events as a minor, her options are notable, like those of Luna Sobron, the other Spaniard who, without the brilliance of her compatriot, She added a 68 to Thursday’s 65 to stay tied with Fátima and just one shot behind England’s Charley Hull.
Sobron also played without errors (68 strokes), but was not able to find the brilliance and determination on the greens that her partner on the national teams had in the middle of the last decade and who, like Fernández, also suffered ailments the last year, although Luna was unable to keep the LPGA card. Carlota Ciganda, for her part, is twelfth, eight strokes behind the leader, after having straightened out a day that started very crooked. After standing on the tee of the 12th hole with three over par, he signed the par for the course thanks to an applaudable reaction.
