McIlroy at ease with favourite tag

GOLF:THE CLARET Jug never made it back to Holywood, that town in north Down which nowadays is synonymous with Rory McIlroy.

Yesterday, though, the 21-year-old Ulsterman, wiser and hardened by his British Open experience, let it be known that the new 3 Irish Open trophy, a mixture of crystal and silver known as “Perfect Swing”, would provide some consolation were he to lift the title here.

In fact, McIlroy has no doubt that, were he to win the Irish Open over the Killeen course, it would rank as the high point (so far) of a career which has seen him emerge as one of the world’s top players. Higher even than his breakthrough win on the US Tour earlier this season in the Quail Hollow championship when he closed with an outrageous 62.

“If I was to add the Irish Open title this week it would probably be – I don’t know if it would be the best win, but it would be the most important.

“To win in front of your home crowd would be very special. Pádraig did it at Adare (in 2007) and Shane obviously did it last year. It would be nice to keep that trend going of home winners over he past few years.

“I wouldn’t put it ahead of winning a major, no, but I’d definitely put it ahead of the two I’ve already won.”

McIlroy – who won the Dubai Desert Classic last year and the Quail Hollow championship in May – added: “They were important milestones, but it would be nice to get my second European Tour win and to get that out of the way and get going.”

Ranked eighth in the world, and installed as the bookmakers’ favourite, McIlroy is comfortable with that tag.

“That’s fine with me. Everyone was talking about being second-favourite at St Andrews and how I was going to deal with that. It’s fine. I realise that I’m the top-ranked player here. I should be the favourite. It’s a nice little bit of extra pressure to have, definitely.”

McIlroy is facing into a hectic part of the season, with the Irish Open kicking off a run that takes in the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and the US PGA. He then has a week’s rest before moving into the US Tour’s FedEx Cup series – when he plays the Barclays, the Deutsche Bank and the BMW – before another week’s break is followed by the Tour Championship, the Ryder Cup and the Dunhill Links.

Of his season to date, McIlroy remarked: “I’d split it into two halves. The first half, I’d give myself three out of 10, the second half eight or nine out of 10. The first half of the season, I struggled and had the sore back and I just wasn’t getting any sort of momentum. Quail Hollow just came out of the blue. I missed the cut at the Players the week after, but since then it’s been good.

“The US Open was a bit of a setback, but I feel as if my game’s really come round, especially the way I played at the French Open. If I’d holed any putts at all, I could have won that.

“And I played really well at the Open. Friday just sort of killed me a little bit. If that had been different, it could have been a different story.”

After that horrible 80 on the Friday, McIlroy faced the music, as it were.

“I suppose I learned from the Masters last year, the whole bunker thing. I didn’t stop and talk to the media. I let it brew up inside me a little bit.

“(But) on the Friday night (at St Andrews) I went and talked to you guys. Got it all out of my system, said, ‘look, this is what happened. I didn’t play great’, and that was a very important thing for me to do because it let me start fresh on Saturday morning. The way I played at the weekend was the most pleasing thing to me about the whole week.”

Now, he has moved on.

“I’m ready to go,” said McIlroy.

Another challenge awaits.