It looked like a nice day in Scotland on Friday at the World Cup of Golf matches.
Only problem was, it’s in Australia, it’s summer-time there and it’s supposed to be hot and dry.
Things got ugly for the second round of play. Ugly as in winds blowing 20-30 miles per hour, constant rain and chilly temps — around 56 with a colder “feels-like.”
The scores were just as ugly. The bad weather couldn’t have come at a worse time as the two-man teams were playing the difficult “alternate-shot” format.
In the 28-team field, five teams shot higher than 81 at the Metropolitan Club outside Melbourne.
Three teams managed to break par and they shot 71s. Two teams shot even par. The rest were over par.
The American duo of Matt Kuchar and Kyle Stanley fared okay early. After opening with 66 in the best-ball on Thursday, they were only one-over at the turn in the testy conditions. But the inward nine was a different story. They bogeyed the final five holes coming in for 42 and posted 79, one-over through 36 and tied for 21st.
Two teams are tied at 10-under. Thomas Pieters and Thomas Detry from Belgium added 71 to their opening 63 to get to 10-under while South Koreans Ben An and Si Woo Kim shot 72, 10 shots higher than their opening 62.
“It was really tough out there,” Pieters said. “To be honest, I didn’t think we would finish today. Waking up this morning and getting here, it was just like horizontal rain.”
