Major breakthrough looks even further away for McIlroy after latest blow

TOUGH TO TAKE: Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland reacts alongside caddy Harry Diamond. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Even now, after all these years, the goldfish bowl that is Rory McIlroy’s day job makes for an extraordinary sight when you press your nose up to the glass. It’s an abnormal normality that, stripped of its context and his star power, strikes as utterly ridiculous.

Incomprehensible.

There were close to 90 people inside the ropes on the first tee when he started his last round of this Amgen Irish Open on Sunday. Hundreds more craned their necks all the way down the left side of the fairway when he appeared shortly after one o’clock.

One father and son had espied him on the partial privacy of the putting green earlier by standing on their tippy-toes and jutting their chins up and over a hedge from a good hundred yards distant. The mere whisper of that contact had clearly made their day.

This is the weight that McIlroy carries courtesy of every gaze. Tiger Woods owns a record of 44-2 in tournaments where he led after 54 holes. McIlroy’s now reads eleven in 21 after this title somehow, in some way, slipped through the cracks.

This was one that really should not have gotten away.

Rasmus Hojgaard chipped in twice on the back nine, that’s true. So is the fact that the eagle putt McIlroy had to secure a playoff on 18 slipped past by a blade or two of grass. This was won by the smallest of margins, but should it have been?

The local favourite will think back to the two very gettable birdie putts left behind at the turn, to the loose approach on 15 that cost him a shot, and to the brain fart that was the birdie putt on 17 that sped ten feet back and ended with another bogey.

He had been three ahead of the field when saving par on the third and Matteo Manassero, his playing partner and closest chaser at the time, carded a bogey. 

His next birdie wouldn’t come for nine more holes as Manassero, Daniel Brown and Hojgaard closed in.

It all felt depressingly familiar.

McIlroy had spoken last week about the doubled-edged sword that is his home tournament. He had touched on the demands and the expectations that are added to his plate, and which have all too often left him with a bad case of indigestion.

His 2016 win aside, McIlroy has rarely been a leading character come Sunday afternoon as the Irish Open has navigated its way around the island every 12 months. This looked like being different. It should have been different.

Instead, it must be another calving from the iceberg that is his confidence. 

The aura that once attached itself to him remains in spite of his struggles when it matters most, but that has shrunk from the days when he was deemed the natural successor to Woods.

This is a man who seems to have tried everything to get over the line when it matters most this last decade. He has arrived early to, and late for majors, immersed himself in tournament weeks and tried to skirt their edges so that their enormity subsides.

Staying in the family home in Belfast, as he did this week, clearly helped. “I have felt detached, that’s why I started well,” he said at one point. But even that wasn’t enough to get him over the line an hour south of Holywood.

This bore strong shades of St Andrews two years ago when he shared a third-round Open Championship lead with Viktor Hovland only to shoot a bog standard 70 and be overtaken on the inside by Cameron Smith’s 65.

Hojgaard shot the same here.

It adds to all those majors lost from eminently winnable positions since his last in 2014 and it hardens the suspicion that the drought can’t be anything other than mental. There is an equilibrium that is lost when the need and want is at its greatest.

“What the heck,” said one commentator when the ball rattled past the cup on the second-last hole. 

Another pointed the finger at the ‘burden of expectations’. It was a theme that knotted itself through the TV coverage the longer the shadows grew.

McIlroy remains an endlessly fascinating character. A man who can flip-flop on everything from his views on the Ryder Cup, golf in the Olympics, LIV, management teams and even marriages, but the player is maybe more of an enigma than the man.

He has won three times this year but will still end it unfulfilled professionally, this failure to become the first Irishman since Harry Bradshaw in 1949 to win a second Irish Open adding colour to an unwanted portrait of underachievement.

The next major, the Masters in Augusta, is another seven months down the road. 

The journey there, and the extra step or two it takes to get over the line when the next big opportunity arises, seems all the longer after the end game here.