Golf: Aditi Ashok finishes fourth for third Top-5 finish of the season on LPGA Tour

Indias Aditi Ashok logged her third successive Top5 finish in strokeplay events on the LPGA as she finished tied fourth at the Mizuho Americas Cup golf tournamentOlympian Aditi ended two shots behind the ultimate winner Rose Zhang who grabbed the title in her maiden tournament as a professional Zhang shot 70696674 to be 9under and beat Jennifer Kupcho 71706969 on the second playoff holeHae Ran Ryu was third while Aditi Japans Ayaka Furue 69 and Koreas Eun Hee Ji 71 were tied for fourthAditi who started the day at 9under and tied second after the third round twice reached double digits under par and was very much on course to a maiden win as she was also tied for the lead more than onceThen came a nightmarish stretch with four bogeys in a span of seven holes from the ninth to the 15th That saw her crash to sixunder A fightback with backtoback birdies on the 16th and 17th got her to 8under but even at tied third she was running out of holesAditi was 8under and tied third at the 18th tee but a bogey on that dropped her to 7under and tied fourth as Hae Ran Ryu 70 was sole thirdAfter just three bogeys over the first three days Aditi dropped twice that number on the final day against four birdiesAditi now finished tiedsecond T2 T5 and T4 in her last three strokeplay events on LPGA and she is already in the Top 20 of the Road to CME Globe Order of Merit and should be ranked higher than her previous careerbest 49th in world rankings when the new list comes out in a dayZhang who had no birdies on the final day bogeyed the fourth to drop from 11under to 10under and then dropped a shot on the 18th to fall to 9underJennifer Kupcho who started the day at 6under and then rocketed to 10under with birdies on the second and sixth and an eagle two on Par4 seventh saw her get to 10under alongside Aditi and ZhangThen Aditi fell back but Zhang held on for pars till the final bogey Kupcho bogeyed ninth and 12th but had a birdie in between on the 10th though she was unable to find any birdies over the last six holesZhang and Kupcho went into a playoff at 9under and both parred the first extra hole On the second Kupcho found trouble and Zhang calmly twoputted for par as Kupcho failed to do so giving young Zhang a win in her first pro start and immediate membership to LPGAAlso Read Aditi Ashok finishes second at LA ChampionshipThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever