Better Round, and poor round!!

Well I played 36 holes today, and overall it was a very mixed bag. My 2 rounds were compiled very differently. In the morning I shot a level par 72 and hardly put a bad swing on the ball!! One bad swing and a 3-putt caused two 6's but other than that it was the steady kind of round I used to compile regularly. I'm beginning to realise how important the 2 move is to my swing and how much easier it is to make my downswing from this position.

I did not play well in the afternoon, however. Considering it was a darn sight better condition for scoring with much less wind, 78 was not a good effort, especially considering how it was compiled. It was a bit alarming actually because for some reason I felt unbelievably anxious over the ball and just felt like I couldn't get into the right place at the top and therefore that the ball could literally go anywhere. On one shot, I literally had to stop mid-swing as I felt so bad at the top of the backswing!! This was worrying and I couldn't come to terms with it. I don't know what happened there really. I recovered to hit plenty of good shots but I was not swinging with any confidence at all. I hardly hit a good iron shot the whole way round. I'm pretty sure that I was tilting my shoulders on my downswing and therefore trapping myself. I'm gonna need another range session to work on this. I need to get my arms working better on my backswing as I seem to be getting really 'steer-ey' all the time and I know I don't need to. But for some reason, I can't trust myself.

And as for pitching the ball, well this is now becoming a serious problem. I made so many bogeys today from pitch shots. It was driving me bonkers. I must have steered every bloody one of them and as for distance control, AWFUL!! This can't go on any longer - I need to spend a lot of time pitching and getting confident. A pro golfer should never be shying away from pitch shots! These are supposed to be what seperates the good from the great and to be totally honest, half the time I don't even feel like i'm gonna hit the green!! And my putting still sucks too. I had 2 ridiculous 3 putts today from nowhere and miss so many short putts it was painful. I just couldn't trust where I was aiming and was putting a bloody good push stroke on the ball again. This is not good. There seem to be a lot of negatives in this blog. I guess that +6 over 2 rounds was not a bad total considering the amount of rubbish in there and it was a 7 shot improvement on last week. Hopefully I can build on this. I'm gonna go back to my Jim Hardy book tho and see if I can't find something on my backswing to sort myself out. I think I need to work on the forearm rotation to the top of my backswing. I'll look at this tomorrow and write again after.

I'll leave it there for now....