It was an odd business. On the 26th of July, the last day of the Women’s Scottish Open at Dundonald Links, Anna Nordqvist, who is Europe’s captain for the upcoming Solheim Cup at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, talked of how she had ruled herself out of juggling the captaincy with playing against the Americans. “I took on the captaincy because I was content that I was going to play in another [Solheim Cup],” she said.
Now 39, she could certainly have played in another – and another. Yet on Wednesday, the three-time major winner announced she would retire from competitive golf after playing in this week’s FM Championship near Boston.
“I’m not sure what the future has in store for me, but it’s with a grateful heart I have decided to retire from playing professional golf to focus on my health and my family,” she wrote in a letter that she read on Instagram.
Of course she was entitled to change her mind, but it did set her fans wondering why she would have sent out the news ahead of the Solheim Cup rather than after it, especially when she has never been one for courting attention from the media. (In teenage years, she had thought she would like to be a journalist, only one week in a newspaper office told her that there was nothing she would like to do less.)
Vis-à-vis the Solheim Cup, Nordqvist has always wanted to do things her way and, at least as yet, her way has been very different to that of the U.S. captain, Angela Stanford. Whereas Stanford had given up on competitive golf in November 2024 to devote herself to her captaincy role, Nordqvist found herself playing some of the best golf of her career. Though it helped her to stay in touch with plenty of her “team possibles,” it can only have been a tortuous experience, especially when she closed with a 68 to finish among the leading Europeans at the recent AIG Women’s Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.
Her many admirers saw it as a travesty that Nordqvist, a nine-time Solheim Cup competitor, wouldn’t be playing in this year’s match, especially when she ended up with a team which includes as many as four newcomers. Though Lottie Woad is ranked sixth in the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings, the other three have been showing plenty of promise whilst lacking experience. Any one of them – Mimi Rhodes, Julia López Ramirez or Nastasia Nadaud – could do as did 17-year-old Charley Hull in 2013 by winning a couple of points at the first time of asking, but is this a bit of a risk?
“The team needs Anna as a player,” maintained one of the European players’ close relations. “The Americans would be far more scared of her than they would of this collection of newcomers. There’s a lovely side to Anna but she’s shy and scary at the same time.”
The Europeans have just the one major winner in Maja Stark, who won the 2025 U.S. Women’s Open. That might sound a tad disappointing but the truth is that they have mind-blowing players in their midst.
Another experienced soul to have missed out on a Nordqvist selection is England’s Georgia Hall, who won the 2018 Women’s British Open and the ’20 Cambia Portland Classic. Yes she had a baby at the start of the year but, once she got back to work, she knew she was improving by the day. Most recently, she had a top-10 finish in the PIF London Championship at the Centurion Club. You wouldn’t want to play her all and every day at Bernardus, but surely she would have been a good bet for partnering one of the new players in foursomes and four-balls.
Now for how Stanford must have reacted when she learned of the four first-timers in Nordqvist’s team. She had a couple of weeks to think about it and, when the day came to announce her captain’s picks last Tuesday, she had just the one novice in Lindy Duncan, though there was a second in Auston Kim who had in fact made enough points to qualify. Duncan, though 35, was an obvious choice in that she had notched as many as 14 top-10 finishes in the last couple of years.
“Statistically, she’s one of our best putters,” Stanford said.
Her team includes three major champions in Nelly Korda, who won the 2021 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, the ’24 and ’26 Chevron Championships and the ’26 US Women’s Open; Jennifer Kupcho, a Chevron winner in ’22, and Allisen Corpuz, who won the U.S. Women’s Open of ’23.
The Europeans, in turn, have just the one major winner in Maja Stark, who won the 2025 U.S. Women’s Open. That might sound a tad disappointing but the truth is that they have mind-blowing players in their midst. Woad, 22, won the Augusta National Women’s Amateur in ’24 and went on from there to win the ’25 Women’s Irish Open as an amateur and then, a few weeks later, the Women’s Scottish Open in her first outing as a professional. Thirty-year-old Hull is of the same calibre, what with 13 top-ten finishes in majors, four tied for seconds and one second on her own in the ’23 AIG Women’s Open.
Linn Grant, meantime, was the first female winner of the Volvo Car Scandinavian Mixed in 2022 and won it again two years later. The joint DP World Tour and Ladies European Tour event consisted of 78 men and 78 women and, in ’22, the Swede won by a staggering nine strokes. Surely enough to frighten a few Ryder Cup men.
Not a shot has been hit at the time of writing but, what with two captains and their very different ways, you can only wonder which way is going to work.