Can Portrush return light Rory McIlroy’s fire? – Open Championship talking points

By Carl Markham, PA

Royal Portrush will host the 153rd Open Championship for only the third time in its history.

Six years ago Irishman Shane Lowry made his major breakthrough, a popular winner once home favourite Rory McIlroy missed the cut.

Here, we look at this year’s event in Northern Ireland.

Finally ending his long quest for a career grand slam with a win at Augusta has had its drawbacks, with the sharpness disappearing from Rory McIlroy’s game and his driving and approach shots suffering the most. The Northern Irishman will be well aware when the Open came back to Portrush – where he shot a course-record 61 as a 16-year-old – he tried too hard at his ‘home’ major. He missed the cut by a stroke after a first-round blow-up despite shooting 65 on the Friday. Feeding off the emotion and not succumbing to it will be key.

Not since Nick Faldo lifted his third Claret Jug at Muirfield in 1992 has an Englishman won the Open. However, the chances look as slim as ever this year. Tommy Fleetwood is the country’s top-ranked player at 13 and finished second on this course in 2019. There are only three other Englishmen in the top 50: Tyrrell Hatton, Justin Rose and Aaron Rai. Considering the average ranking of the last 10 champions is 13, it would look like an English triumph would have to buck the trend.

Statistics help narrow down the contenders, not withstanding a Ben Curtis-type shock. The average world ranking of champions since 2000 is 37 – skewed by world number 396 Curtis – but every winner since 2012 has been inside the top 30. This century, Tiger Woods is the only world number one to lift the Claret Jug, in 2000, 2005 and 2006 – which would appear to rule out Scottie Scheffler. Last year’s champion Xander Schauffele, Jordan Spieth and Ernie Els are the only other players to win while ranked in the world’s top three, which offers hope to McIlroy and Schauffele. The average age of champions since 2000 is 32.5, while 18 of the last 24 winners had recorded a previous top-10 finish at The Open. Winners since 2000 average 8.58 previous Open appearances. Schauffele – aged 30, world number three, with seven previous Opens – would appear to meet most of the metrics but the bad news for the defending champion is only eight have ever won back-to-back since the first World War, with only Woods and Padraig Harrington achieving it in the last 42 years.

Portrush’s second Open in six years has re-established the venue on the championship’s 10-course rota but its arrival in Northern Ireland will intensify calls for the south of the country to be bestowed the honour for the first time. The highly-rated Portmarnock Golf Club to the north of Dublin across the border in the Republic has been spoken about many times. An Open there would be the first time the event has been staged outside of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but the R&A are not opposed to adding a course regularly listed in the world’s top 100, having hosted the 2024 Women’s Amateur and 2019 Amateur – both run by the R&A – and 19 Irish Opens. “We’re having a proper look at it. It’s clearly a great course,” said new chief executive Mark Darbon, who visited Portmarnock earlier this year.

The conditions are nearly always a talking point when golf’s oldest major rocks up at a seaside course but it is wind rather than rain which is usually more of an issue. In the final round in 2019 at Portrush, Shane Lowry made light of miserable, wet conditions to win by six, and three of the last four Opens have had to deal with less-than-ideal weather. The early forecast is for things not to be as bad as they were six years ago, but even in July and even with the summer we have been having, the Causeway Coast can throw up its fair share of obstacles, with some rain expected.