Rory McIlroy bombed a drive down the 12th fairway and had a little wedge in his hands for the approach. The ball had barely left the clubface when he allowed the club to follow. Instinctively, he’d known the connection was poor. On retrieving the club, and with both hands, he held it across the back of his neck. The body language told the story.
Yet, that wedge shot was an aberration. The world number 10's wedge play has generally been good of late (having gone from outside the top 100 in the stats on the PGA Tour to inside the top 30 since working with Pete Cowen); and, although the sum of the parts failed to click into place in a first round of the DDF Irish Open that had him signing for a level-par 72, there was no pressing of any panic buttons, just a post-round visit to the range to work out some elements of his swings that needed fixing.
“Yeah, it’s (about) syncing up everything. I missed a few left out there and just sort of (my) body stops and the club keeps going and goes left. So I’ve just to really clear and sort of get out of my way, clear and turn my right side better,” explained McIlroy.
There were no excuses about lingering jet-lag following his midweek transatlantic flight, nothing like that. “I just didn’t play well . . . I didn’t feel like I did that much wrong. Overall, just sort of no momentum going forward and, in the end, I did well to keep it at level par,” he conceded, making par on the Par 5 17th after driving into the water and again saving par from the greenside bunker on 18.
McIlroy, playing in his first Irish Open in three years, attracted the largest gallery of the afternoon where he had Tommy Fleetwood and defending champion John Catlin as playing companions.
“I got on the first tee and put my tee in the ground and there’s this big clap, but then the silence you feel afterwards, it’s something I haven’t felt in a while. It’s a different sound. I feel like on the PGA Tour there’s a lot going on, a bit of white noise. I was over the ball on the first tee and I was like, ‘it’s sort of quiet’. That’s the one thing I thought, ‘oh, this is really quiet. It’s different’. But it’s good to be back.”
In a round that brought three birdies and three bogeys, to lie in tied-89th, McIlroy aimed to recalibrate and go again: “I just need to play better and if I play better, I’ll shoot a better score. It’s a bit early in the tournament to start to try to shoot certain scores and see what I need. If play well (in the second round), I’ll shoot a better score and we’ll go from there.”
