Hovland: ‘Ik kijk niet naar de ander’

If somebody asked you to give them your one or two best pieces of advice for match play specifically, whether it's psychological, whether it's practical, whatever, what would you say?
One thing is -- I've kind of -- I try to keep myself thinking this way, as well. Obviously expecting the other person to play well, and knowing that, thinking that, okay, if I go out and shoot -- it's quite a lot of wind, so I think the course will be playing a lot harder.
But let's say this course when it's no wind, it tends to play a little bit easier. And then just have the mindset that okay, I'm probably going to have to shoot 5-, 6-under par to beat this guy and kind of just focus on playing your own score.
I feel like sometimes I've tried to maybe force things a little bit too much knowing the other guy is 40 feet away and feeling like I have to stick one in there close and then end up short-siding myself.
Then he two-putts for a win and I make bogey instead of just playing my normal game and putting the pressure on the opponent instead of maybe giving it to him a couple times here and there. It's just to kind of stick to your own game and let things happen.
Yeah, I mean, to be frank, I don't like to look too much about the other player, especially not if we're playing in match play. I'll watch the shot, but I'm not looking at oh, his swing is like this, he kind of grips it like that, he does three or four waggles.
I try to just kind of pay attention to the ball and then I stick to what I'm doing. I mean, you certainly pay attention if the other guy is making a lot of putts, and then as soon as he has a six-footer to tie, you just know that he's going to make it versus maybe having a good chance to miss it.
A couple things here and there, and if the other guy is really striping it, you don't really -- as I say, you don't get your hopes up that he's going to make a mistake. It just puts more pressure on your game and know that you can't give the opponent anything for free. Yeah, you certainly pay attention if the other guy is making putts or is flushing it.
If you see a guy hook a couple tee shots and you get to a hole that has a hard right-to-left wind, maybe he's more likely to miss the left again there. But if you start thinking about that on every single hole and hoping that he's going to do that, I feel like that takes away the focus on me just doing well. So instead of hoping for the other guy to mess up, I try to just focus on making birdies to beat the other guy.
I would say I'm fair when it’s about giving putts. Not that maybe there's anything fair or not to it, I don't know. But if it's a tap-in, I'm going to give those putts. But if there's a chance the other person is going to miss it, then yeah, I'm going to have him putt it out. That's what we do normally in a stroke-play event. So yeah, if the other person takes that the wrong way, then so be it.