Woods suffers shock defeat

Woods did not card a birdie until the 16th hole

Tiger Woods was sent spinning out of the World Match Play Championship, with a shock defeat at the hands of Peter O'Malley in California.

The world number one and hot favourite was knocked out in the first round of the prestigious event, which brings together the best 64 players in the world.

The other two top seeds, Phil Mickelson and David Duval, were also sent crashing out on Wednesday.

Australian O'Malley - who at 64 was ranked the worst player in the field - beat the top seed 2 and 1, in one of the biggest upsets the championship has seen.

Nobody expected me to win

Peter O'Malley

But Woods - rated by many experts as the greatest golfer of all time - shrugged off talk of a long-term slump in his form.

"There's nothing really wrong. I was real solid, real consistent," he said.

"I hit a lot of beautiful putts, they just didn't go in. They were wobbling all over the place."

Woods' defeat was just the most spectacular of a series of surprises on day one.

Second seed Phil Mickelson lost 3 and 2 at the hands of John Cook, while Open champion David Duval was defeated at the second extra hole by Kevin Sutherland.

Second seed Mickelson also lost

But if the biggest American names suffered, then so did the leading British and Irish hopes.

Darren Clarke, who won the event two years ago, was one of the first to fall - a victim of little-known American Matt Gogel.

And Colin Montgomerie, Padraig Harrington, Paul Lawrie and Philip Price also slumped to first-round defeats.

Spanish pair Sergio Garcia and Jose Maria Olazabal were left as the standard bearers for Europe, while England's Lee Westwood and Paul McGinley of Ireland recorded convincing wins.

Missed putts

But all the focus on day one was on Woods.

He struggled on the greens throughout and he had no answer to the steady match-play of O'Malley.

The Australian, who only qualified for the event when Jose Coceres suffered a broken arm, took the lead with birdies on the eighth and ninth holes, and never allowed Woods a chance to get back in the match.

A string of missed putts by Woods allowed O'Malley to move into a three-hole lead with three to play.

So off-key was Woods' game that he did not card a birdie until the 16th hole - when he sank a huge 30-foot putt to at last raise the spirits of his huge army of fans.

But Woods was rapidly running out of holes - and O'Malley refused to buckle under the pressure as he sank a long birdie putt on the 17th to wrap up a famous win.

"Nobody expected me to win," O'Malley said. "I just had to play the kind of golf I had been playing the past few weeks, and it worked out."