POULTER’S DREAMS OF THE BIG ONE SLIP AWAY

British challenge falters as Ian and Rory just can’t get going on Moving Day

POLITE applause fits Ian Poulter as badly as a sober suit but that was his accompaniment as he laboured around Royal Birkdale yesterday in fits and starts of birdies and bogeys and his longed for challenge for The Open ebbed slowly and sadly away.

Poulter had played brilliantly over the first two days to drag himself into contention and the romantics had persuaded themselves that, after his second-place finish the last time The Open was played here in 2008 and the way he had battled through qualifying at Woburn just to make the field this time, the omens were all on his side.

The crowds willed him on, as they always do on these shores, and he did his best to feed off their energy, flashing a thumbs-up when they shouted his name and pumping his fist when he drained one of his four birdies, but for all the cheers there were enough silences to tell an observer that he never built up the kind of momentum he craves.

It was only early in the evening when the angry, black clouds began to roll towards the sea from the Pennines that Poulter’s round suffered its fatal blows, with dropped shots at three consecutive holes on the back nine, but Jordan Spieth and Matt Kuchar were already stretching their legs at the top of the leaderboard by then anyway.

For Poulter and Rory McIlroy, it had become one of those days of listening to roars booming out across the golf course and knowing that they are not for you. For both the men who had carried British hopes when play began yesterday morning, the day they call Moving Day at a major proved to be an illusion.

As The Open lay becalmed in balmy sunshine, turned into a putting contest dominated by Americans, neither Poulter nor McIlroy moved very much at all. By the end of a thoroughly frustrating day for their fans, McIlroy had gained a shot and Poulter had lost one. Both men lay locked together on two under, an unreachable nine shots behind Spieth.

This is Poulter’s 54th major championship and most would love him to crown a career that has been defined by his totemic heroics in the Ryder Cup with a victory in one of the great individual events but this appears to have been another opportunity briefly glimpsed and then lost on the links.

It was not for want of trying, of course. It never is with Poulter. He worked and worked, and grinded for all he was worth and when he put together back-to-back birdies at the turn, it seemed that he might yet conjure a charge up the leaderboard. His trio of bogeys put paid to that.

The day brought a different kind of frustration for McIlroy. He started like the player of old, the superstar who could hold a course in the palm of his hand and do with it what he wanted. He birdied three of the first five holes. When Spieth started his round slowly, it felt briefly as if this could be the day when McIlroy finally got his mojo back. Spieth and Dustin Johnson, the men who have done the most to steal away his crown as the world’s No 1 player, were prominent on the leaderboard and it seemed in the opening holes of his round as though this would be his opportunity to remind them of his own greatness.

But McIlroy is still searching for the player he once was. On current form, he is capable of flashes of his old brilliance but nothing more. He cannot sustain the brilliance and two bogeys and a double bogey in the space of four holes around the turn sucked all the promise out of his round.

A rainbow arched across the course as McIlroy finished his round in a one-under-par 69 but all that lay at the end of it for him was another putt that rolled past the hole and one last angry swish of his club as he battled the idea that another shot at adding a fifth major championship to his tally has eluded him.

‘I’ve always been good when I get off to fast starts,’ McIlroy said after his round, ‘and I’ve been able to keep it going — but I didn’t today. And I needed to, so that’s the disappointing thing. This week has been a step in the right direction, there’s no doubt about it, so now I need to pick myself up, play a good round tomorrow and hope for some bad weather.

‘And then I need to hope that some guys struggle. We’ll see what happens. I feel like today was an opportunity lost to get right in the mix going into tomorrow. It’s almost there. It’s not quite where I need it to be to win the biggest golf tournaments in the world but it’s getting there.’

It still feels as if McIlroy has the most talent of any of the leading contenders but rather than a talent you can rely upon, he is starting to become an enigma. How to explain his terrible start to this year’s Open, for instance? Without that hour of self-destruction, he would be right in the mix now. Instead, it is Spieth who is closing in on what would be his third major victory.

Poulter finished his round in steady rain, hooking his approach into a greenside bunker at the 18th. He gripped his club in fury and bent it out of shape as he walked up the fairway. He got up and down for a brilliant save but as he shook hands with Brooks Koepka, who is still in with a small chance on five under, Poulter looked weary with disappointment.

‘I’m in bonus week,’ he had said on Friday evening and this has been another big step in his rehabilitation after nearly losing his PGA Tour card last year.

Both players are in the top 10 going into the final day of The Open. It is hardly a bleak outlook. It is just not quite what either man had been dreaming of when the day began.