If you have missed the green with an approach shot, but you have left yourself a nice little chip around the green. It’s often quite a good time to sort of set yourself a challenge of trying to get that ball up and down in the next 2 shots, but one thing you have really got to consider is although the ball might be near to the edge of the green, how is the ball actually lying, that green side ruff might be a patch of grass that’s actually quite well watered. If it’s within the scope of the sprinklers that will sprinkle the green you often see the thick luscious softest grass, dense grass around the greens and that can make chipping and pitching the golf ball from that quite difficult.

So the first thing to do is not just to look at how far you have got to go and what you have got to go over, but how is the ball actually sitting, is the ball sitting at the top of the grass on the grass or is the ball really deep nestled down in the grass and then play those shots slightly differently. If it’s sitting down in the grass, the bottom, you need plenty of loft but you also need a bit of a bounce angle, so that would be your sand wedge, sand wedge has more bounce than any of the club in your bag, it’s got plenty of loft, you can set the face a little bit open as well and then hit down splashing underneath the ball, almost playing it like an explosion shot, almost like a bunker shot getting underneath, getting the club to bounce off the surface and pitch the ball out nicely.

If the ball is sitting on top of the grass, particularly thick lush grass around the green, there is a real danger that you could go completely underneath that ball with a wedge and just scale it and possibly even drop it straight back down into the hole that you just made. Particularly if you are trying to play that shot with a very lofted club my lob wedge for example here has very little sort of face a very low profile face particularly if you then open that club face ball sitting up on long grass you could just chop it’s legs clean off and it just falls into the hole you have made. So it’s better to actually play those shots with more of a chipping style and actually play clean off the surface not expecting to dig down too deep. The one thing I think I would really encourage you to do here is go find a line that looks similar to the one the ball is already in and take your practice stroke there. So you might not necessarily take your practice stroke just next to the ball as normal, you might come back a couple of feet, find a line to match it and look similar and just make a practice stroke here and just feel how the club cuts into the grass, feel whether the club is going to decelerate too much or whether it’s going to keep zipping through the surface and accelerate nicely then as you approach the ball again you will have a bit more of a consistent feel of how it’s actually going to work, think about whether you are digging this ball out like a bunker shot or whether you are playing it nice and cleanly off the surface then go ahead bit a with of confidence and try and get that ball up and down again.