Swing guru Cowen to iron out ‘slight flaw’ in Mcilroy’s game

Rory Mcilroy has confessed that it was “anything but an easy decision” to hire Pete Cowen after 23 years of staying faithful to his boyhood coach. However, he re-emphasised his frustrations in his battle with his swing and the “dreaded two-way miss”, admitting he was uncertain which direction the ball was heading at the top of his backswing.

With the Masters only two weeks away and Mcilroy in poor form, he has already started working with Cowen, the renowned Yorkshireman with 10 majors and 275 tour wins on his creaking CV.

Yet after the Golf Channel interviewer who Mcilroy spoke to yesterday first reported that he had “parted ways” with Michael Bannon, his camp insisted that the fellow Northern Irishman, who had been Mcilroy’s sole swing coach from the age of eight, was still involved. The Daily Telegraph had exclusively revealed on Monday that Mcilroy was bringing in Cowen, 70, on a formal basis and his agent, Sean O’flaherty, yesterday confirmed the news to ESPN.

“Pete is an addition to Rory’s performance team,” O’flaherty said. This team includes Brad Faxon as putting adviser, Harry Diamond as caddie and Bannon himself. Mcilroy is a loyal character who would not wish to unceremoniously ditch his long-time mentor and friend. But there can be no doubt that Cowen is now taking the reins as Mcilroy targets ending his six-year run without a major at Augusta, and so becoming just the sixth male player in history to complete the career grand slam.

Yesterday, Mcilroy was on the range at the WGC Match Play in Texas, employing one of Cowen’s

trademark drills: hitting half shots, swinging the club with only his right arm. Cowen and Mcilroy will have analysed what was needed to fix the two-way miss, and Cowen has decided to focus on the downswing instead of the backswing.

At the Players two weeks ago, Mcilroy admitted that in his attempt to emulate Bryson Dechambeau’s 200mph ball speed, he had unwittingly introduced gremlins into his fabled rhythm, and this has led to him falling out of the world’s top 10, without a win in 17 months

“I’ve got myself into an unusual pattern,” Mcilroy said. “Usually the club gets out in front of me on the way back and then drops behind me on the way down. But at the minute it’s the opposite.”

Either the arms are staying trapped behind Mcilroy, resulting in a slice, or in an attempt to compensate, in the last milliseconds he is flipping the club, causing a hook.

In short, he is desperately trying to rediscover that feeling which established him as one of the most natural-looking ball-strikers of all time. Initially, Cowen said that the issue was “only a slight flaw” and sounded confident that Mcilroy would have it solved at Sawgrass. But there followed the 79-75 mediocrity.

In his 25 years on Tour, Cowen has seen it all and this will appear a minor problem compared to his work with Henrik Stenson, who the coach claims was “not only missing the fairway, but missing the world” when they linked up in 2001.

“No job is too big for Pete,” said Stenson, who has won the Open and risen as high as world No2 in his 20-year relationship with Cowen.

One of the factors that will have drawn Mcilroy to Cowen, the former European Tour pro he has known since he was 14, is his apparent ubiquity on the range. However, he is not at Austin Country Club this week. After a month-long run in the States, Cowen has returned to his Yorkshire home and will travel back across the Atlantic next week for the build-up to the Masters. Until then, he will be in close contact with Mcilroy and keeping a close eye on today’s first round-robin match with Ian England’s Ian Poulter.