The dream of the Spanish sextet to revalidate their title in the European Women’s Team Championship 2024, and to do it at home, vanished this Thursday. The culprit was the German team, exuberant and precise at key moments at the Royal Spanish Equestrian Society Club de Campo (Madrid).
The quarterfinals twisted early in the morning, when the German red began to show finer than the Spanish red. Cayetana Fernández and Carla Bernat, winning pair in the triumphant 2023 edition, hit the ball full of confidence, but they ran into an insurmountable German wall: Helen Briem, world number 2, and Celine Sattlekau, who on her birthday acted as a fantastic squire. The duel always had a German colour and was settled on hole 17.
There was the bullet of Julia López and Carla Tejedo to close the morning in a draw, but the coin fell tails. Spain paid a high price for its lack of finesse in the early holes – it quickly went down -, and although it recovered with good putts (Julia got what was denied to her yesterday), in the first tiebreak hole Paula Schultz-Hanssen and Charlotte Back put the 2-0. Critical situation.
Andrea and Paula made the Spanish team dream
Captain Adriana Zwanck and coach Sergio de Céspedes arranged for the first individual match to Paula Martín, extraordinary in the knockout phase. But that was not the duel that closed the shutters earlier; that privilege was run by Andrea Revuelta, who ran over Chiara Horder with big hits and millimetric putts.
The Madrid woman won her match with a tremendous ‘stride’ at 14 and ran to carry the bag to her friend Paula Martín, with whom she will share classroom and training at Stanford in a few weeks. Christin Eisenbeiss, very playful, came back a 3up from the Spaniard between 13 and 15 and only gave up at 18. Two all in the score and three matches to play.
In this type of confrontations, in which the actresses are golfers located around the Top 100 worldwide with many shots given, the details usually weigh a lot. Thus, by details, the match between Carla Bernat and Charlotte Back was decided. The German took her moment at 17 to take a point that always seemed to have the Castellon woman as owner.
Julia López also enjoyed small advantages throughout her round, but Paula Schulz-Hanssen played the 18 with extreme quality, leaving the birdie made with an exquisite shot from the antegreen. End of the film. To add insult to injury, Helen Briem, when everything was already lost, deprived Carla Tejedo of the honour of winning one of the imminent figures of world golf with a five-meter putt. It was clear that today was not the day.
