Rory McIlroy: I've got time and there will be plenty of major opportunities

Rory McIlroy on the 12th tee during a practice round prior to Thursday's PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park. Picture: Sean M. Haffey, Getty Images

Rory McIlroy will tee it up at Harding Park Thursday for the first major championship of the year confident there will be opportunities for him to break his six-year title drought.

The world number three has returned to the San Francisco municipal course where he won the WGC-Cadillac Match Play Championship in 2015 to try and land a third PGA Championship.

Now 31, when the Irishman last lifted the huge Wanamaker Trophy at Valhalla in 2014 it would be his last visit to a majors’ winning enclosure and on Wednesday he admitted not being able to add a fifth major to his resumé had weighed on him to a degree.

“It doesn't keep me up at night and I don't think about it every day, but when I play these major championships, it's something that I'm obviously reminded of,” McIlroy said during a virtual media conference from TPC Harding Park.

“I would have liked to have won a couple more majors in that timeframe, and I feel like I've had a couple of decent chances to do so and I just haven't got the job done.

“But the good thing is we have at least three opportunities this year, and then hopefully if things normalise going forward, four opportunities (in 2021). So we're playing seven major championships in the next 12 months basically.

“I've got plenty of opportunities coming my way. Everyone that stands up here wishes they would have won more and would have played better and all that stuff and I've given myself chances, I just haven't been able to capitalise on them.”

Whether McIlroy will be in a position to cash in this week in northern California remains the $1.98m (€1.67m) question. The dominant form that enabled him to land the Tour Championship and FedEx Series at the end of last summer and continued into 2020 as he returned to the world number ranking deserted him during the lockdown and he admitted he had been missing the necessary sharpness to turn solid golf into winning scores.

“Before the world shut down, I was playing some really good golf, consistent. And then having that three-month break, coming back, everything sort of changed. Everything feels different, in the competitive arena, anyway.

“But my game doesn't feel that far away. I feel like I've played pretty well. I just haven't got a lot out of my game. Haven't scored as well as I was doing before the lockdown. Wasn't really efficient, or haven't been efficient as I was back then. Short game hasn't quite been as sharp.

“It's the first major in over a year, and it would be a great week to get back into some form and give it a good run.”