If we’ve now understood the importance of trying to keep this clubface square at set up and square to the first checkpoint of halfway back here, square being toe pointing up to the sky, it’s important to understand what one of the faults might be and a fault might be having the club facing a closed position at this point. So from a square set up if you’re brining the club back in into a closed position let’s consider what the fault might be.

The first thing to check is if your left shoulder is doing the right job and actually if your left shoulder is dipping down too much that can often put the club in a closed position. The left shoulder dipping down is a problem. The left shoulder should rotate forwards more rather than dip down. So from the front-on view the left shoulder should come around here, but actually if it dips down this way we’re going to end up with the club in quite a closed position, so check that your left shoulder dipping isn’t is the issue.

The second thing I would consider that you need to look at is making sure that you have a nice neutral grip position. So your grip starts off in a neutral place there, if you’re shoulder does the right job the club should go to a good position and your hands shouldn’t really be manipulating the clubface too much, but actually if you have your grip in too strong a position and the hands sit too far underneath the club, what we often see though is as the hands works away the club tries to turn back to neutral because the hands are trying to get back to neutral and that actually in this case shut the clubface. So the hands are tying to work to neutral, that can cause you problems.

And more rarely I would sometimes see that actually a very weak grip might cause the clubface to shut and if somebody has got a week grip they might then just try and overuse that hands and rather than letting the hands just turn away they lift up with the right hand because the right hand is trying to dominate from a week position, it’s trying to dominate, and that could put the club into a closed position as well.

So check you’ve got a nice neutral grip and your left shoulder is turning and working around and not dipping down and if those two things are happening you should have more control of your clubface to make sure it gets back to an as neutral take-back position.