Late collapse just ‘a blip’ insists G-Mac

GRAEME MCDOWELL last night dismissed his last round collapse in the US Players Championship as “a blip on the radar” and placed it a long way behind Rory McIlroy’s Masters meltdown last month.

McDowell is one of the six players in the field for the Volvo World Match Play Championship starting at Finca Cortesin tomorrow who enjoys top nine status in the world rankings. Just as McIlroy showed his mettle by getting into contention in Malaysia on the week immediately after the Masters, McDowell is intent on doing the same on this occasion, his confidence boosted by a liking for matchplay golf and for a course that he saw for the first time yesterday.

“I was very disappointed at my finish in the Players but that’s all behind me now,” McDowell declared. “I think Rory’s Sunday afternoon at Augusta was very different from my afternoon at the Players. For a start, that was the Masters.

The Players is the 5th major in inverted commas but it’s nothing compared to the Masters.

“My 79 was more a factor of the way I played the last five or six holes. My race was run when I hit it in the water at 13 and 17, I was just turning 76 into 79 — Rory shoots 80 and his day was done by 12. Of course, people are going to draw comparisons. But they were two very different situations… I’m sure the mindsets were very different, the pressure on Rory was the hell of a lot greater than it was on me. The Masters is something a bit different.”

Nevertheless, the frequency with which big name players have failed to stay the pace on the final day of a number of recent big tournaments suggests that coming from behind is often a better proposition.

Darren Clarke, for instance, was four off the pace after 54 holes in Majorca on Sunday before going on to win by three and obviously Charl Schwartzel had a lot of ground to make up on McIlroy at the Masters. McDowell, who clung on to a one stroke advantage to capture the US Open at Pebble Beach last June, doesn’t necessarily see it like that.

“I’d have preferred to do it the way I did it at the Players as opposed to making the cut on the number and shooting a few under par at the weekend,” he maintained. “To play as well as I did to lead the tournament through three rounds against a world-class field made me very proud, especially because only two or three weeks ago my game was in very poor shape. Sunday certainly wasn’t what I had in mind but I took a lot of positives away from the week. I got back to playing the way I know I can play.

“There’s no doubt the mindset from being a couple back is different from the mindset of being in the lead. I was telling myself going out on Sunday afternoon that it wasn’t my tournament to lose because there were so many guys within three or four shots of the lead. If I hadn’t doubled the last in the third round, I would have walked into the fourth with a three stroke advantage and that’s a different mindset. I felt my mind was in the right place and felt good under the pressure.

“But physically, I didn’t feel great. I just ran out of steam. I don’t know if I got my nutrition right between rounds. It was just a long week in the heat and when I bogeyed 6 and 7, I felt the energy drain right out of me. My legs were tired and I didn’t swing the club well at all. I went chasing and it didn’t happen. I’m not making excuses because it was the same for everyone. Of course, I was very disappointed, I had a great chance to win one of the biggest tournaments in the world.”

McDowell now faces up to another physically demanding golf course against an extremely strong field. He insists that he will be mentally ready by the time the gun goes tomorrow and likes what he has seen so far of the Finca Cortesin lay-out. This is also his first time playing on European soil since his victory last October in the Andalucia Masters at nearby Valderrama and is also energised by a return to match-play, a format of the game he revelled in during his amateur days.

“I’ve just played the front nine for the first time, a nice track with phenomenal greens,” he said. “It’s going to be a great match-play test but I’m not sure I’d like to play it with a card in my pocket. It’s interesting, I’m US Open champion and I meet Louis Oosthuizen, the British Open champion, before going up against Jhonattan Vegas, whom I don’t a whole lot about.”