In the end, in a way it was almost disappointing.
When Rory McIlroy clobbered a long iron through the wind to three feet at the brutal sixth hole, the toughest at Royal Birkdale, it seemed the 2014 champion was about to start one of his trademark surges.
McIlroy is nothing if not a streaky player, but when he gets momentum and on a forward roll he seems like the most unstoppable force in the game of golf.
He holed the putt to go to three-under for the day, just two-under for the championship. The lead was still five-under at the time. But you could almost hear the trembling of the rest of the field.
Instead, he spent most of the rest of the day scrambling for pars, made two bogeys and a restorative birdie on the 17th, finishing with a 68 at one-under. Not shabby at all, and well in the tournament –certainly more than he was at five-over after six holes on Thursday – but it felt a bit more underwhelming than it could have been.
Rory, however, was “ecstatic”.
“To be in after two days and be under-par for this championship after the way I started?” he reasoned.
“They’re the putts that haven’t quite been going in over the past few weeks,” he said of his par saves around the turn. “That’s all it takes to keep a round going, and to see them go in gives me a lot of confidence going into the weekend.”
Sometimes the questioning of Rory gets a little too gushing, and while he was pleased with himself he didn’t hesitate to slap down the suggestion that it said something about him as a man to have come back.
“Yeah…(long pause)…I mean it’s not as if I was in a war out there,” he said, doing well not to roll his eyes.
““It was just a round of golf. Look, I just had to turn it around. I set myself a target of being in a better position today than I was yesterday.
“I wanted to be at least level-par or under-par if possible, and I’ve been able to achieve that.
“This was definitely the round that got me back into the championship.”
