McILROY MAY NEED TO SHAKE-UP SUPPORT TEAM TO FIND ‘SPARK’
RORY McILROY might not interact with social media these days, but the Holywood star will not be oblivious to calls for him to make major changes after Sunday’s Bay Hill blues.
As US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau chiselled out his eighth PGA Tour victory in the Arnold Palmer Invitational, holding off the evergreen Lee Westwood (48) with a heady cocktail of big-hitting, controlled iron play and clutch putting, the Nothern Irishman added two more balls to the lake at the sixth and limped away from Orlando admitting he needs to do something to change his fading fortunes.
Without a win for 16 months and bereft in the Majors for almost seven years, he fell three spots to 11th in the world yesterday – his worst ranking in three years.
Describe
“I don’t know what the word is or how to describe it, but just a little dejected,” McIlroy said of his game heading to TPC Sawgrass for this week’s Players Championship.
“Maybe looking to go in a different direction. I don’t know. I need something, I need a spark, I need something, and I just don’t seem to have it. Some days it’s good, some days it’s not.”
He will be in the interview room at 9.0am local time today, but while he will inevitably be asked if he needs a change of caddie or coach, he’s clearly struggling for answers himself.
As Paul McGinley remarked after McIlroy failed to turn the 54-hole lead into victory in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship in January, the 31-year-old struggles to deal with pressure situations and makes mistakes Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus rarely made.
“He feels a lot of expectation, both internally and externally, but doesn’t seem to have a strategy to counteract what sits side by side with anyone so talented,” McGinley wrote in his column for Sky Sports.
“That, to me, is the root of the issue, as I don’t see any part of his game that is particularly weak.”
Tellingly, when McIlroy returned to world No 1 in February last year for the first time since 2015, he made sure he celebrated with his caddie and friend Harry Diamond and told the world: “This was our journey and we did it, two guys that grew up in Holywood, Northern Ireland, playing golf together, and that we’ve done this is something that was really cool.”
Whether that journey has come to an end remains to be seen, but there are certainly questions for ‘Team McIlroy’ to ponder in the wake of the two tee shots he pumped into the lake at the par-five sixth on Sunday, leading to a tournament-wrecking double-bogey seven.
McIlroy will likely be asked about his lifelong relationship with coach Michael Bannon, who he has seen infrequently since the Covid-19 crisis struck a year ago.
Just five weeks after being crowned PGA Tour Player of the Year for the third time since 2012, he sought out Butch Harmon on a trip to Las Vegas to play the CJ Cup at Shadow Creek last year.
“We spent about four and a half hours together, going through everything in his swing,” Harmon reported at the time. “He came to see me because he just wanted to make sure he was on the right track.”
McIlroy didn’t win in Las Vegas, but he did make an incredible 23 birdies that week and went on to swap videos and texts with the veteran coach over the next few weeks. Since then, however, the magic has been lacking.
The Down man is joined at Sawgrass by the impressive DeChambeau, now sixth in the world, as well as the struggling Graeme McDowell and Shane Lowry.
The European Tour, meanwhile, returns for the start of a three-week run, comprising the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters and back-to-back events in Nairobi, the Magical Kenya Open and the Kenya Savannah Classic. Paul Dunne will have ‘Elvis’ on the bag – Richard Sterne’s caddie, Nkosikhona Seme – for the three-week stint alongside Jonathan Caldwell and Cormac Sharvin.
Some 12,000km away, McIlroy may put ‘Suspicious Minds’ at rest or confirm that while he’s ‘All Shook Up’, the spark he seeks is internal and not something a caddie or coach can provide.