One issue a lot of golfers have in bunkers that they are often asking me about is that they tell me they can get the ball out of the bunker, “No problem getting the ball out of the bunker, I just can’t get the ball to stay on the green, it just lands and it just rolls off the other side.” And the main issue there, the main difference between that bunker shot and the shot you might have hit from the grass is the amount of spin you’re able to impact on the ball. Golfers when they hit the ball from the grass do spin the ball. Whether you think you’re spinning it or not, you’re always impacting back spin. But from a bunker it’s slightly more difficult to impact backspin so often when the ball lands on the green in the right place where you expect it to then spin and stop, it doesn’t and it lands and rolls over.

And the different spin is that when you have to bunker shot, you generally have sand caught between the club face and the golf ball. So if you hit two inches of sand as you’re often told to do in a bunker, there’s a layer of sand that appears here between club face and ball. As that hits the ball, it will give the ball a little bit of height but it won’t give the ball, a great deal of spin. You can almost imagine a bulldozer pushing sand down the road here and that just bulldozes into the side of that ball, moves the ball up and forwards but doesn’t impact spin.

So if you’re keen to get this ball out with a bit of height and try and get the ball to check when it lands, it’s really important that you take less sand. So take a nice lofted club, sand wedge or lob wedge, nice swing, little bit of sand behind the ball but not too much. Try and get a bit more club on ball contact and spin the ball out of the bunker rather than gouging into the sand and taking all the sand that gets stuck between the club face and the ball which produces the shot that doesn’t spin.

Keep your golf club nice and clean and dry before you enter the bunker as well so your grooves are clean and dry, that would encourage a bit more spin on the back of the ball as well. You play the face nicely open, you play the stance nicely open, it’s quite a delicate swing because we are not going to have the slowing down process that we normally have in the bunker with the sand. We are just going to click the back of the ball cleanly; we play it a little bit more like a flop shot if you like. We’re going to try and fly the ball out and get it to spin up quite quickly. So play the ball nicely forwards in the stance, nice open club face, not too much sand when we play this one.

When that ball comes down you’ll see just one bounce and it puts quite a lot of spin back on the ball. If you’ve seen any of the bunker shots I’ve hit from this bunker today, you’ll appreciate my landing area has been a lot shorter, and the ball has been rolling out a lot further. That bunker shot was very different, played a little bit more delicately, a little bit less sand, one bounce and really puts the so if I had a smaller green or a smaller target to work with, that spinning shot would have worked really nicely.