Irish pair take the positives ahead of FedEx Cup

It may have come a week too late for his PGA Championship defence hopes but Rory McIlroy is more than confident he has turned a corner in time to rescue what has been a substandard season.

As Graeme McDowell opined following the completion of a season of major disappointments on Sunday night at Oak Hill, timing is not an exact science when it comes to peaking for the biggest tournaments of the year and compared to 2012, his good friend McIlroy was seven days behind schedule in terms of adding to his majors haul.

It was the previous week last year when McIlroy left behind a summer of discontent and scored a top-10 at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, a shift in fortunes that paved the way for a record-breaking eight-stroke PGA Championship victory the following Sunday at Kiawah Island. That in turn sent McIlroy into the FedEx Cup play-offs like a man possessed and he won back-to-back big-money events at the DeutscheBank and BMW Championships before taking the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai to finish the year as money leader on both the PGA and European Tours.