He needs to start well
In athletics in the early 2000s, French 400m runner Marc Raquil had an unusual strategy. He would always start off slow for the first 200m and then accelerate past tired legs to try to grab victory at the end.
At the 2003 World Championships final, he was last by a wide margin heading into the home straight and powered through to the silver medal. In the 4x400m relay it was similar, with Raquil coming from behind and threatening the gold, but landing silver again. Always starting too far back for gold.
Rory McIlroy has been the Marc Raquil of the Masters since his unfortunate meltdown in 2011. His holed bunker shot on 18 to finish second in 2022 was his 2003 World Championship moment.
The cliche is that the Masters starts on the back nine on Sunday, but McIlroy’s back nine Sundays, bar 2011, have been fine. He has had seven rounds in the 60s on Sunday in the Masters, but only two on Thursday – a 65 in 2011 and a 69 in 2018. It is no coincidence they were his two best chances to win the Green Jacket.
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Slow starts are not the way in the Masters. In the past 25 years, only Tiger Woods (three times) and Phil Mickelson (once) have won after being outside the top 10 on the first day. The average score of the last five Masters winners in their first round is 66.8. McIlroy’s first round average in that time is 73.4.
Whether it is a case of nerves or the pin positions not fitting his eye, McIlroy must improve his opening round or the Green Jacket will be out of reach once more.
Beat Scottie Scheffler
Like how it was believed in the Premier League in Alex Ferguson’s day that if you finished ahead of Manchester United in the table, you would probably win the league, McIlroy finishing ahead of Scheffler would be half the battle in winning the Masters.
The Northern Irishman has failed to finish ahead of Scheffler in any April Masters, the only time coming when Scheffler was a rookie at the unusual Covid-impacted Augusta in 2020. Since 2021, the American has been 29 shots better than McIlroy over the 12 rounds they have both played (McIlroy missed two cuts in that time).
Watching Scheffler talk about his preparation for the tournament, he appears to have mastered (pardon the pun) the shots required to post low scores at this course. McIlroy in 16 years at Augusta has not quite worked it out, at least when the pressure has been on.
Find a preparation strategy that works
In the previous two years, McIlroy has built up to Augusta in very different ways. In 2023, he arrived early, played the course almost every day (and well) for a week, played in the par 3 contest before running out of steam before the tournament began, shooting 72-77 to miss the cut.
Last year, he played a PGA Tour tournament in Texas beforehand and was the last man to register in Augusta on Tuesday, barely played the course, and skipped the par 3 contest. He also played eight times around the world last year before the Masters.
This year he has settled back to six outings in the build-up, the same as 2023, and spent his time scouting and practising in Augusta in two separate weeks before tournament week. Encouragingly he has won two of those six events on the PGA Tour this season. It is the first time in his career he has won multiple tournaments heading into the Masters.
Survive the start of the back nine
McIlroy’s worst two holes at Augusta National are the 11th (+21) and 10th (+15) holes. While he is not alone in struggling on the two long par 4s, they have wreaked particular havoc on his scorecards. It is no surprise that McIlroy has struggled at the 10th hole after the scar tissue of hooking his ball into the cabins on the left in 2011 as his final round unravelled.
On 11 last year, playing with the eventual champion Scheffler in high winds on Friday, a long wait to hit his second shot proved to be too much to bear as he pulled his ball into the water en route to a double bogey that effectively ended his challenge. Scheffler went through 10 and 11 in one under to McIlroy’s two over. While the par 5s at 13 and 15 are scoring opportunities, McIlroy needs to get as far as them unscathed.
Find a way to block out the noise
There is no doubt McIlroy is good enough to win the Masters, but so were Ernie Els, Greg Norman and the many other great players who failed to ever don the Green Jacket.
Mental baggage builds up, the memories of bad shots and bad putts, and heartbreaking trips home. Every year McIlroy has to deal with the hype about whether it is his year and if he can join the elite group of players who have won the career Grand Slam (Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods).
The overwhelming pressure has seemed to suffocate his game and has resulted in him making mental errors on the course he usually would not make, and only opening up and playing well when he finds himself down the leaderboard.
In his press conference on Tuesday, McIlroy said he needed to “block out the noise” as much as possible. But since his last Masters attempt he has had more moments of Major trauma, missing two putts inside four feet to lose the US Open by one.
A recent Players Championship victory will have done his confidence the world of good, but after more than a decade without a Major, McIlroy needs to prove he can handle the pressure in the big moments on the Augusta stage.
