BY HIS OWN admission, he never quite played as well as he can, but a long eagle putt on the par five 15th has kept Rory McIlroy in the hunt after three days of play in The Memorial at Muirfield.
Ten strokes behind with six holes to play, the 22-year-old from County Down picked up three shots down the back stretch and watched as tournament leader Steve Stricker dropped a couple of his own to tighten things up at the top of the leaderboard.
McIlroy’s 71 left him on seven-under par, five behind Stricker, with the youngster happy to simply still be in the mix after a largely disappointing afternoon.
Even though I didn’t play my best stuff today, I’m still in a decent position going into tomorrow. And that’s all you can ask for.
Stricker holed out from the fairway for one of his two eagles, wound up with a three-under 69, finished with a three-shot lead - and still had to convince himself it was a good day.
Right when it looked as though he might leave everyone in his wake, he missed a 4-foot birdie putt on the 14th hole that threw his round into reverse. He made bogey on the par-5 15th. He missed a 4-foot par putt on the 16th, and had a 7-foot birdie on the next hole catch the lip. And when he arrived to his ball in the middle of the 18th fairway, it was right in the middle of a sand-filled divot.
Stricker managed to save par on the last hole, and perspective soon followed.
All of a sudden, things seemed pretty hard, when at the start of the day, things were really going my way. But I understand that, and I understand that’s the nature of this game. So you add them up at the end, and it was a 69. And it was a good score.
The score that matters is 12-under par, which was three shots clear of Jonathan Byrd.
Matt Kuchar was the only player who seemed capable of keeping up with Stricker in the early going, but he dropped two shots in his last four holes and had to settle for a 68. That put him in a tie for third with Brandt Jobe, four shots behind.
Former PGA champion Shaun Micheel and Mark Wilson, looking for his third tour win of the season, are a further shot back in a three-way tie for fifth with McIlroy.
Meanwhile, any hope which Graeme McDowell had of making it back-to-back titles at the Welsh Open in Celtic Manor came to a swift end yesterday.
The 2010 champion recorded three double-bogeys and a quadruple-bogey eight at the 12th en route to a disastrous ten-over par round of 81, plummeting from the top end of the leaderboard to finish the day on three-over.
Sweden’s Alexander Noren takes a single shot lead into today’s final round in Newport, his three-round total of eight-under giving him the slenderest of advantages over fellow countryman Peter Hanson and Denmark’s Anders Hansen.
– Additional reporting by AP
