Jon Rahm completed another very good week at LIV Golf. He finished third in Nashville. He has finished eight tournaments in the Saudi league in 2024 and in all of them he has finished in the top 10. The only exception was Houston, three weeks ago, when he had to withdraw during the second round due to an infection in his left foot. The season is noteworthy, but it lacks the outstanding. It’s okay, but it seems insufficient for a player who has a much higher standard. Even more insufficient if we include the first three Majors of this year in the balance. Nobody has to explain it to Rahm. He himself knows that his results are below his expectations.
When performance is not a disaster, far from it, but he is not achieving the excellence he has had in other years, especially in the form of victories, it is more difficult to make a diagnosis and find a solution. Therefore, the statements made by Jon himself at the end of the Nashville tournament are quite valuable. He seems to have a clear idea of where the ‘breakdown’ is and assures that he is going to get to work to fix it.
Despite the team victory, the third of the season harvested in Nashville, Jon admitted that the feeling the tournament had left him was bittersweet. “Individually you want to do well, you want to win, but this Sunday I would have needed a really low round to have caught up with Tyrrell Hatton. If I had done the eight under par on Saturday, the tournament would probably have been more exciting, but even so I would have finished two strokes behind him. I think it would have been impossible to catch him this week. It’s easier to focus on my flaws this week. I had four penalty strokes, one out of bounds and three in the water. It is on this above anything else that I am going to put all my attention, knowing that we have two weeks for Valderrama, a week in which I definitely want to win,” he explains.
That is, the occasional inconsistency within solidity. Rahm is still very solid in all areas of the game and, especially from the tee. The statistics say so. He makes more birdies than anyone in LIV Golf, catches more than sixty percent of the fairways and is on green in regulation almost 75 percent of the time. In all the tee to green statistics he is above average, the problem is that his mistakes, which are few, are costing him a lot. He knows it and is going to get to work.
Having made the diagnosis, the first crucial step, the important thing now is the treatment to remedy it. That’s a bit more difficult. You can’t say he has a technical problem when he is the fourth one catching the most greens in regulation in LIV Golf. They are occasional mistakes, disconnections, short circuits that come and go. These are the most difficult mistakes to solve, but Jon is on it to arrive in perfect condition for the appointment at Valderrama.
In the meantime, he enjoys the team successes a lot. “Before starting the tournament I had the impression that it was not going to be a good week for us because of the type of course. I think we are more suited to demanding challenges than birdie festivals… But of course, after saying this, we won the tournament. It was nice at least to walk the last hole knowing that it was more or less done. I am very proud of the whole team and, especially this week, of Tyrrell,” he says.
