Two years ago at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, the European Solheim Cup team were standing on the brink of history. To win – or retain – the cup, would make it four straight Solheim Cups where the trophy remained in European hands.
In fact, they’d already made history at Finca Cortesin 12 months previously – the Ryder Cup switching back to odd years forced the Solheim Cup to move to evens – by securing a tie and keeping it for a third.
The European success at Gleneagles in 2019 may well have been the greatest Solheim Cup of them all, with Suzann Pettersen, absent from the game for almost two years on maternity leave, holing a seven-footer to win hole, match, and cup on the final green and in the final remaining match on course in the Sunday singles, but in the two editions that followed, a new European superstar emerged.
Leona Maguire was one of six wildcards selected by Catriona Matthew for the match at Inverness in Ohio, and had yet to win on the LPGA Tour. It’s rare that a debutant in any such team competition is selected for all five matches – but with each passing round, leaving Maguire on the sidelines became more and more impossible.
It always takes two to tango in paired matches, foursomes in particular, but it was telling that Leona was the only player in European blue – and there were none in American red – to suit up for battle in five straight, and her four-and-a-half-point haul, which included a 5&4 singles win over soon-to-be major champion Jennifer Kupcho, was the most dominant performance by a rookie in Solheim Cup history and made her the undisputed MVP of the event.
Two years later, back on European soil, she had a target on her back. Now a two-time LPGA winner, her scalp was highly sought, and Nelly Korda – then world number two – and Allisen Corpuz – the reigning U.S. Women’s Open champion – got it early as the U.S. side completed a clean sweep of the morning foursomes for the first time ever.
A rallying cry was needed, and it was Maguire again who stood tallest for Europe in the afternoon, chipping in on the 18th to put the first European point on the board. Just over 48 hours later, she put Rose Zhang to the sword in singles and played a cheerleader’s role as the others duked it out to a 14-14 tie that felt much more like a win for Europe and a defeat for the United States.
Her undefeated record was gone, but her status as the inspirational backbone of the European side was only enhanced.
This made it all the more strange that, on her third appearance at RTJ in Virginia in ’24, she was reduced to a bit-part player and the only European not to feature at all on day two. To be fair, her form coming into that Solheim Cup wasn’t on par with the prior two, and she didn’t perform to the standards she’d set in her 6&4 day one fourballs loss, but she answered the snub in the best possible way and let her clubs do the talking in singles to take down Ally Ewing 4&3.
With that point in the bag, but the U.S. on the verge of winning the trophy back, the usually guarded Maguire broke character and didn’t hold back on the disappointment of playing such a limited role and felt that she’d proven a point on that final day.
Those decisions were likely data-driven – her lack of distance and the golf course setup to favour long hitter being the primary one – but getting too caught up in the stats is a trap in itself and there are no statistical models to gauge fighting spirit and the will to win.
We’ll never know if things would’ve panned out differently if she’d played a bigger role, but no fingers could’ve been pointed in her direction when it came to dishing out the blame in the aftermath.
Fast forward two years and she arrives at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands as a wildcard in terms of how she earned her place in the side, how she’ll be utilised, and how she’ll perform.
Now ranked 80th in the world and having fallen as far as 115th from a high of 10 back in ’23, you’d expect that a player who has only three top-10 finishes in 13 months to be cast in a supporting role rather than as leading actress.
Her major championship performances have been disappointing – four missed cuts from the five in 2026 – but her most recent start resulted in a T4 finish at the KPMG Women’s Irish Open and putting her front and centre and giving her the platform to do what she does best has proven to be a winning formula and European captain Anna Nordqvist – a fellow team member in each of Maguire’s three previous appearances – knows that better than most.
Behind those shades lie the eyes of a cold-blooded killer in matchplay golf, and you’d have to think that the reward of playing her early and often is worth the risk.
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