Jon Rahm (+2) has scored well in the extremely tough test that today’s third round of the Open has been for the last stretch of the day’s matches, where all the favourites were obviously marching. For hours, the game was played at Royal Troon under the best conditions of the week, without water and a bearable breeze. In fact, today we have seen by far the best results of the week, and not only because the first ‘sixty-fives’ have been signed, two to be more exact, by Thriston Lawrence and Sam Burns, but also because up to fourteen players have gone under seventy strokes, compared to the very few 22 who had done so in the two previous rounds with 158 players on the field.
However, shortly after the Spaniard took to the field, it started to rain and it was not going to stop. The matter was not going to end there: the rain was gradually joined by an increase in wind intensity, this time from the north, and the nine holes back became a minefield.
That’s why, the record of 72 strokes by Jon, one more on the day, under such circumstances, even reaches a high pass. It may even touch excellence, considering that of the last matches only Billy Horschel (-4, today card of 69 strokes), tournament leader, and Xander Schauffele (-3, today card of 69) managed to beat the field. The thing is that he, starting eight strokes behind the leader, needed something more to get neck-deep in the fight for victory. From excellence upwards. And it was not easy.
Today, nothing was even half simple or routine at Royal Troon. But to win any golf tournament, much more a Major, you have to plug in a little more, and that’s what Jon lacked in the first half of the course, with the wind in his favour. A stretch in which other candidates from those last ten matches did manage to make some collection of birdies. This was the case with Horschel, who swept through with a four-under par for the first nine, Schauffele (three-under par), and even the very Shane Lowry (-1), the big loser of the day, but who stepped up to the 8th tee with a two-under par in his pocket.
It is necessary to plug in and, if possible, do it also from medium, and even long distances. And Rahm has not been on that wave. “I haven’t put anything in, and not just today. It’s a mix of things: when I’ve read the putts well I didn’t reach the hole and when I’ve reached the hole well I didn’t read the fall well,” explained the Barrika native. Be that as it may, we continue to see the best Rahm of the season in the Majors and he still has a final round ahead of him in which he has the chance to do something more than just make up his performance in Scottish lands. He, of course, has not yet thrown in the towel. Tomorrow he goes out six strokes behind the leader and does not rule out making the round of the year and making it very difficult for the fourteen players who currently precede him in the table. All it takes is for him to really come out with a sharp putter and reach the trance state of a year ago in the third round of the Open at Royal Liverpool, in which he delivered a stunning 63…
