Rory McIlroy has once again hit the wall at Augusta National. Another year. The Northern Irishman arrived in Georgia with the intention of winning a Major again and closing the circle of Grand Slams more than a decade later. It couldn’t be and he wasn’t close to it at any time. Who would have told us before the tournament that a Sunday match between Rory McIlroy and Joaquin Niemann, would start more than hours before the stellar match. A disappointment for McIlroy himself.
The Northern Irishman’s game is not missing, nor are the results catastrophic, but Rory knows he can give much more: “If I look at the recent results they are not terrible weeks at all, but there is a lot of room for improvement. I’m close in some aspects, but I feel very far in others. It’s a bit… once I manage to recover one thing and leave it behind, another one appears, and then another one,” Rory summarises.
As we say, McIlroy is in search of something more and he can’t find it, he knows that his level of play is decent, but it is not enough, not by far, to fight the now omnipotent Scheffler.
Rory seeks to analyse what happened and get back on track as soon as possible to regain confidence: “I need to take some time and reflect on what has happened this week, what I have done well and what things have not turned out as expected and try to make a plan for the next few months, especially from here to obviously the end of July. I hope to arrive in better shape for the last three majors”.
In the face of such a statement one might think that the four-time Grand Slam champion has decided to stop. Not at all. Quite the opposite. The plan is already laid out. The Northern Irishman has decided that playing, playing and playing is the solution to his current problems: “I’m not going to slow down, I’ll play the next two weeks in Hilton Head and in New Orleans. I’ll take a week off, I’ll play Quail Hollow, I’ll play the PGA, I’ll take another week off, then I’ll play another four tournaments in a row”. Eight tournaments in the next ten weeks. Wow.
However, Rory warns, if he does not find the way back in this stretch, the solution will go to the opposite extreme: “It’s hard to play a lot of golf and make big changes at the same time. I don’t feel that I need to make big changes in my game and that’s why I’m going to play so much… But if the time comes when I need to make big changes in my golf swing and really try to reassess, it could be a process of six months to a year. I’m not saying I wouldn’t play tournaments during that time, but I would focus on the technical aspect and not on the results. I don’t think I’ve reached that point yet, but there may come a time when I have to address it,” concluded the Northern Irishman.
In these situations the mental aspect is key not to rush: “That’s the hard thing when you’re not in shape. You search and search and think a lot about it, but when you’re in shape, you don’t think about it at all. So it’s about finding that balance”.
Keep an eye on Rory’s next few months, if he doesn’t feel that his game is where he needs it to be, he might take a big break. Playing in occasional tournaments, but with priority on the practice field. Maybe it won’t be necessary to go to that extreme. We’ll see.
