Golf: She's 12 and she could be champ

Lydia Ko says she's playing pretty well but the exertion of back-to-back golf is catching up with her. Photo / Getty Images

Lydia Ko first played in the New Zealand women's golf championships when she was seven and she skipped down the fairways at Titirangi and struggled with her sums at the end of the round.

Back on the same course today, the Pupuke player will play Cecilia Cho in the 36-hole final of the matchplay championship at the advanced age of 12. Bespectacled and full of concentration, the year eight pupil from Pinehurst School on Auckland's North Shore will be trying to become the youngest winner of the title.

The men's final will be an international affair with Australian Matt Jager playing Nicol van Wyk from South Africa.

Ko, who won the North Island strokeplay championship at Muriwai this month, had a tense semifinal against 20-year-old Tania Tare from the host club. They were level after nine holes. Tare went ahead at the 11th, where Ko three-putted, but they were level again at the next when Tare found a bunker with her tee-shot.

The deadlock was broken with a Ko birdie on the 16th and she clinched the match two and one with a birdie on the next when Tare's drive was blocked by the lone fairway pine.

Ko, a symphony in pink wearing the T-shirt she received for her birthday last Friday, had her mother, Kim, caddying for her.

"I think I played not bad," she said. "But I'm getting tired after all this golf in the last week."

She will need to be at her best to beat the 14-year-old Cho from the Pakuranga Club, who blistered her way past 20-year-old Australian Rebecca Flood 5 and 4. Cho birdied the first four holes and made seven birdies altogether.

This was a notable victory because Flood, from the tiny northwest New South Wales town of Coonabarabran, was the leading amateur at the two major Australian professional tournaments this year.

The men's semifinals produced plenty of drama. The last Kiwi, 20-year-old James Hamilton from the Omanu Club at Mt Maunganui, fought back to be level with Australian Matt Jager playing the last. But he pulled his drive into trees and finally conceded the hole, and the match, to Jager's par.

Scott Arnold, the Australian who has taken over from Danny Lee as world number one amateur, was beaten on the third extra hole by South African Nicol van Wyk, who pushed the match to extra holes with an extraordinary long, curling birdie putt on the 18th.