McIlroy faces uphill struggle
The newly reconstructured West Course yesterday looked the ideal platform for Rory McIlroy to display his wide array of talents before an audience thrilled by his victory in the Quail Hollow Championship on the US Tour.
The manner in which he achieved that win was why he was installed as an 11/1 chance for honours here before play began.
It was quickly apparent, however, that McIlroy wasn’t going to live up to expectations.
He bogeyed the 2nd, 3rd and 5th to be out in three over 38 and the wheels were certainly threatening to come off when he ran up a double bogey five at the relatively innocuous short 10th.
To his credit, though, a string of five pars helped settle things before a couple of birdies arrived towards the finish to raise his flagging spirits and provide hope that he could survive the cut with a sub-60 round this morning.
After his magnificent victory Stateside, McIlroy missed the cut in his next event, the Players Championship at Sawgrass, and is desperate to avoid a similar fate at Wentworth.
“I just need to go out in the morning, start off okay, and get back to somewhere like level, then I should be alright,” he said yesterday.
“Something in the 60s should get me through.”
The memory of Quail Hollow should help to inspire him given that he needed to eagle the 15th in the second round there just to make the cut before going on to bring in 66, 62 over the weekend to win by four.
“I wasn’t very comfortable with my swing on the front nine but I actually played better on the way home and I started hitting some good shots towards the end. That is a positive to take from the day,” he reasoned.
“Not much was wrong except that I didn’t play the par threes very well. Had I played them reasonably, I would have been one under or level and would have been okay.
“Five over through 10 obviously wasn’t great but I hung in there.
“At 16, I played a five wood off the tee and had 112 yards from the middle of the fairway. I hit a pitching wedge to two feet and at the 17th I hit a drive and three wood just left of the green and chipped it up to two feet.
“I missed the green at the 18th with a five wood second, the ball actually hit the pavilion and bounced down about 18 inches from the hazard, and I didn’t get up and down from there.”
The short 10th, however, was a downer and could have been attributed to a few areas where the many alterations to the course haven’t yet quite bedded down.
He took two to get out of a greenside bunker and claimed that “the sand is very inconsistent. There are bunkers that have a lot of sand and some that don’t have any. That makes it hard to judge and I left a few shots in there which isn’t like me because usually I’m a good bunker player.”
He diagnosed his technical problems as “getting a little bit ahead of it on the front nine and then I was afraid to release it because if you’re doing that, the hands come too quickly and I didn’t want to be hitting it left, especially around here. I was trying to slow it down on the back nine and it seemed to work pretty well, I hit a couple of nice shots. I need to go now and try and groove that swing thought in now and hope to be okay for the morning.”
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