McILR0Y’S MASTERS MISERY

Career Grand Slam on hold as Rory stumbles

HEAVEN knows where you go looking for positives when it comes to Rory McIlroy’s fifth attempt to win the career Grand Slam. So totally out of sorts was he for much of the third round of the 83rd Masters yesterday that for anyone who loves the game it simply became sad to watch.

Needing a big round to force his way back into the tournament, the 29-year-old Northern Irishman went the other way over the course of a front nine completed in 38 indifferent shots.

If truth be told, he has looked a pale shadow of the imperious golfer we have seen all season from the moment he stepped on to the first tee for the opening round here and missed the fairway by a country mile.

Only when his challenge was effectively all over did we get fragments of the Rory who came here with such high hopes, as he eagled the 15th and birdied the 16th.

It was too late, alas, to leave him playing for anything other than pride today, as a 71 left him in a tie for 39th when he completed his round.

How on earth did it end up like this, given his lofty ambitions and fabulous form?

There’s no pleasure in drawing the obvious conclusion that this pursuit has mentally become too big for him to handle.

The meditation, the juggling skills, the performance guru and the self-help manuals were all designed to take the pressure away when the gun went off on Thursday.

Credit him, if you like, for putting in all the work to try to solve the puzzle.

It is clearly not easy, however, to fool the intelligent mind of a complete golf geek who knows all too well what it would mean to win all four majors.

The brutal truth is that this fifth attempt was the biggest failure of all. At least last year he got to the final round before struggling to perform.

McIlroy, it should be said, is not alone among the leading lights in struggling to cope with expectation.

How else do you explain the missed halfway cut of world No 1 Justin Rose in the Masters tournament where he has come so close so often and is desperate to win? Or the embarrassing 81 that highly fancied Paul Casey shot in the first round?

It is just that McIlroy operates on an entirely different level, of course, with the litany of successes to his name. Or is supposed to do so.

Watching him yesterday, you had to struggle to remember that the verdict of many this time last week was that McIlroy was in the form of his life.

It was an opinion given plenty of substance by his victory in the Players Championship and six other top-10 finishes in seven starts this season.

Add that to the fact he’d had five top 10s in a row at the Masters and no wonder there was the promise that things would be different this time. No fewer than six bogeys on the opening day were an ominous sign there would be no green jacket once more.

His pitiful statistics after two rounds were indicative of a man feeling the pressure and without the requisite sense of touch and feel in his hands to prosper.

Tied 55th out of the 67 who made the halfway cut when it came to driving accuracy, tied 61st in hitting greens in regulation, tied 59th in holing putts between 5-10ft and tied dead last from 10-20ft, having missed five from five of that length.

Given those depressing figures, no wonder he sounded strangely buoyant at being just seven shots behind at halfway and with a semblance of an opportunity to make amends with a repeat of the 65 he shot on Saturday a year ago.

No birdie at the par five second, however, was followed by the most disappointing of pars at the third, where he all but drove the green at this short par four.

Just 25ft from the flag, he chipped so poorly, the ball not even close to being on the right line, that he finished 15ft away and ended up having to hole from 5ft simply for a par.

Although he did birdie the 4th, two bogeys in a row from the sixth sucked away any life that remained in his challenge.

At the ninth, there was a third bogey in four holes as he finished in a plugged lie in a greenside bunker.

With nothing to lose, McIlroy clearly decided to go for everything on the back nine and did birdie the difficult 10th.

But seeking another birdie at the