Rory McIlroy taking only positives out of Bay Hill runner-up spot ahead of The Players

Rory McIlroy’s planned itinerary to another tilt at the career Grand Slam will involve two tour stops before driving back up Magnolia Lane at Augusta National for next month’s Masters. The first is at this week’s The Players at TPC Sawgrass for the PGA Tour’s flagship event; the next will be the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play in Austin, Texas, in a fortnight’s time.

If a runner-up finish behind Kurt Kitayama in the tough examination that was the Arnold Palmer Invitation at Bay Hill proved anything, it was that the Northern Irishman is ever more comfortable with where his game, and especially his driving, is headed.

“It’s getting better, it’s getting better,” he insisted. “I feel like I figured out the driver a little bit more, it’s getting there. I think still a couple of things to tidy up and try to get more comfortable with. I mean with The Players, [the] Match Play and then the Masters, so there’s two tournaments between now and then and plenty of time to feel a bit more comfortable with where everything is.”

Certainly, the statistical evidence from Arnie’s Place would back up McIlroy’s own assessment that his game is in good shape: he featured strongly in each of the stroke gained categories (12th off the tee, 19th in approach to the green, eighth around the green, fifth tee-to-green) but ranked 40th in putting. Overall, though, McIlroy was first in strokes gained (total).

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An excuse of sorts for the putting came by way of how the greens firmed up. As McIlroy put it, “the greens got baked out. They get crusty. They just get faster as the day goes on. So nothing new here. It’s been that way for the last few years and you just know that you make the weekend at Bay Hill you’re just going to have to hang on a little bit.”

McIlroy – in the marquee group alongside Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler for the opening two rounds of The Players (with anyone of them set to leave Sawgrass on Sunday night as world number one depending on how things play out) – left Orlando for Jacksonville with more positive vibes than negative, helped too by the $1.75 million pay-day for sharing second place. “My game’s rounding into form for the bulk of the season. So, even though I didn’t get the win, I’m still pretty happy with how everything went!

“I need to take the positives from it, which there is a lot of, we’ve got a massive event next week, and just try to bring that momentum into Sawgrass.”

Bay Hill is a notoriously difficult beast to tame and, for sure, both Shane Lowry and Séamus Power will seek to forget the tournament. Lowry’s track record at the place is nothing short of abysmal with at least some consolation in making the cut for the first time in a fifth appearance, while Power finished bottom of the 72 players who made the cut.

Lowry – who has slipped two places to 21st in the world rankings – and Power, down to fifth in the updated FedEx Cup standings, are also in the field for The Players (which has an increased prize fund of $25 million).

For Lowry, it marks the end point of a particularly hectic playing schedule which has seen him play six of the last seven weeks. The Players will make it four straight events on the PGA Tour, where he will be aiming to bring the form that had him contending in the Honda rather than the weekend form of Bay Hill up the road to Sawgrass.