The love affair between the Australian Ladies Masters field and Royal Pines hit a rough patch on Valentine’s Day.

In the 24 times the tournament has been held at the Gold Coast course since 1992 the average winning score is 16-under-par, including six winning margins greater than 20-under.

But the 2015 event heads into the final round on Sunday with three golfers atop the leaderboard on a measly four-under after 54 holes.

In gusty conditions on Saturday only seven players finished their rounds under par, with all seven scoring one-under 72s.

The leading trio, English pair Charley Hull (+2) and Holly Clyburn (+1) and Korean Eun Woo Choi (+2) all ended the day with a worse overall score than when they teed off.

The problem, they believe, is the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the Royal Pines course, which is being rebuilt gradually.

The course features nine new holes this year and nine holes that exist from the previous layout.

Earlier this summer at the Australian PGA Championships, Adam Scott and the rest of the men’s field played the new nine in one section and the old nine in another.

But the Ladies Masters is different, with both nines being a mixture of old and new holes.

Ladies European Tour order of merit winner Hull says that has made it difficult to get up to speed with how each green is playing.

“It’s so much easier putting on the new greens because you know where the ball’s going to stop, you know the tricky parts of the greens,” she said.

“But on the old ones it’s bouncy, you can hit a shot on the green and it’ll hit a brown patch and go over and it can make you look silly.

“On the short putts, getting the pace, it was quite tricky out there.”

Hull had the added worry of an unwanted spot of bird poo in the path of one of her putts on the par-four 17th, a hole she would three-putt for bogey.

“It was stuck to the green,” she said.

“I didn’t want to move it in case I ripped some grass up with it. The referee said it was fine so I let my caddy move it out of the way.

“Maybe I should have moved it because you know they say if a bird poo’s on you it gives you luck but it didn’t appear to give me any luck on that hole, it made me three putt it.”