Under-18 winner Briggs in line for cap

The Scotland team to be named today for the Girls' Home Internationals over Gullane No 2 course from 2 to 5 August is certain to include the two players who provided a Scottish Under-18 girls' matchplay championship of quality at a very wet Glenisla course, Alyth in Perthshire on Saturday.

For the new champion from Bridge of Weir, 18-year-old Eilidh Briggs, it was success at last. The Kilmacolm GC member had been competing in the event since she was ten years old and has now blossomed into a scratch player capable of reaching the final of the Scottish women's amateur championship at Machrihanish earlier in the season.

She has also put herself in position to become a candidate for a first adult Scotland cap, alongside her older sister Megan, in September's internationals at Hillside.

She won the Under-18 girls' matchplay by one hole against Aberdeen-born Gemma Dryburgh, who has spent most of her last few years in America as a student at the IMG Leadbetter Academy in Florida and will enrol at Tulane University, Louisiana next month.

The 18-year-old daughter of a North Sea oil executive, who plays out of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, the family home, reached the semi-finals last year but was surprisingly not given a girls' cap. That situation will surely be rectified today.

Dryburgh, who has a +2 handicap in the States, where she has competed with distinction on the US Junior Tour, but plays off +1 in the UK, lost the first two holes to Briggs and was three down after seven before beginning her fightback to take the match to the last green.

Briggs was roughly par or one-under for the 18 holes, with Dryburgh a shot or two above that after her bogey-bogey start.