Sweden's Henrik Stenson made a stunning recovery to win the Accenture Match Play Championship and admitted it was very much a day of two halves.

Stenson seemed on his way to a painful defeat after making four quick bogeys after lunch to fall two-down after 26 holes of his 36-hole final against Geoff Ogilvy, but he took advantage of some poor play by the defending champion to storm back to a two and one victory at Dove Mountain.

The 30-year-old from Gothenburg is just the second European to win this World Golf Championships event, joining Darren Clarke, the 2000 champion.

"Geoff and I played good golf in the morning (18 holes) but in the afternoon I was struggling big-time," said Stenson.

"I was struggling off the tee, and also with the putter. I don't know how I managed to hold it all together.

"I couldn't say I was floating around thinking how great I was playing. It's such a long day and we played so much earlier in the week that everybody's exhausted. I think both Geoff and I lost concentration a few times and made some stupid mistakes."

After taking a two-up lead after 18 holes, Stenson was all over the map at the start of the second round, but Ogilvy missed a short five-footer to hand Stenson the 27th hole, which turned out to be the pivotal point of the match.

A clearly buoyed Stenson won the 29th hole with a par and the 30th with a birdie to regain the lead and then took the 34th hole, a par-three, by almost holing his tee shot. He closed it out at the next.

It is Stenson's second successive victory, following hard on the heels of the Dubai Desert Classic, and the

1.35million (£687,315) prize lifts him to first on the European Tour Order of Merit.

Ogilvy made no excuses for his defeat: "I didn't bring the game I wanted to the course today," he said. "I didn't play very well this morning, missed some short putts. This afternoon I did the same thing, started out fine and then lost the plot.

"My swing was probably deteriorating all week, but I can't explain missing short putts. I can think of three this morning that were embarrassing and this afternoon there were two or three that were just not good enough."

Stenson, who has joined the US PGA Tour, is expected to rise to fifth when the world rankings are updated tomorrow. He will play this week's Honda Classic in Florida, while Ogilvy will have a week off.