THIS BOY is a fast mover, in more ways than one. Yesterday morning, Rory McIlroy's flight from Abu Dhabi touched down in Dublin at 6.30am. Within a couple of hours, he was part of a photo-shoot – along with jockey Ruby Walsh – on the boardwalk by the river Liffey to launch the new Irish Racing Postdaily edition and, later in the afternoon, he was in Belfast to see a specialist about a back injury that afflicts him on-and-off.

And all on a day when the 20-year-old Ulsterman moved into a career-high position of seventh in the latest official world rankings, creating a milestone of a kind as he also moved ahead of Pádraig Harrington for the first time, making him the leading Irish golfer in the rankings.

McIlroy, whose tied-sixth finish in the Dubai Desert Classic constituted his eighth top-seven finish in his last nine tournaments going back to the USPGA Championship at Hazeltine last August, has a week’s break before embarking on another important step in his career’s development after taking up his US Tour card.

McIlroy will kick-start a heavy commitment to golf Stateside by playing in next week’s Accenture Matchplay in Arizona, and has set himself a target of “multiple wins” on tour in the year ahead as he seeks to add a winner’s killer’s instinct to the trait of consistency which marked his rise up the world rankings.

In fact, McIlroy – who has just one professional win on his CV, last year’s Dubai Desert Classic, but who puts himself into contention virtually every week he plays – has talked with his manager Chubby Chandler about the possibility of seeing a sports psychologist over the coming weeks as he seeks to add to his win ratio.

Just who that mind guru will be remains uncertain, although McIlroy confesses he has read all of Bob Rotella’s books.

Not that McIlroy believes he will learn anything new by going down that road. “The thing about a psychologist is you know what they’re going to say. It is just the reinforcement. It’s the repetition. They tell you so many times it is embedded into your brain and you don’t have to think about it.”

But McIlroy is determined to pursue what is necessary to turn his regular contending in tournaments into more victories. “I have been thinking about it a lot and winning is a habit. If you win and win again quite soon after you get into a feeling of knowing how to finish it of . . . if I can get another win early in the season, it will give me the confidence to know when I’m in contention again I can finish it.

“You have to look at Pádraig (Harrington) in, I think it was 2001 and he had six second place finishes (before winning the season-ending Volvo Masters) and now he is a three-time major winner. So, you have to look at people like that. He bided his time and learned how to finish it off and now he is probably one of the best finishers in golf there is.”

As McIlroy put it yesterday: “I want to win multiple times this year and I will be disappointed if I don’t. I felt like I have put myself into great positions last year to win more than once and didn’t quite do it. I feel as if I should be able to learn from that this year and draw on my experience and, I suppose, learn from my mistakes. There are two ways I could win. I am going to play really well for a week or I will just stumble into it.”

McIlroy’s schedule over the next few months will be entirely devoted to playing in the United States, as he follows on from the Accenture by including the Honda Classic and the CA Championship in his itinerary and then a stint that takes in the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, the Houston Open and the US Masters.

Before he departs for the States on Sunday, McIlroy will have his medical people assess the back problem that flared up again in Dubai. The problem comes from his unique hip movement which was first discovered on slo-mo video when he visited the Titleist Performance Institute in California. Since then, he has been working with South African phsyio Cornell Driesson – who has worked with the Springboks rugby team – to strengthen the area around the left S-I joint.

“Everyone talks about this move that I do with my swing, where the hips go backwards and then go forwards and that puts a little strain on the lower back. I do all the exercises I can to make everything stronger around the joints . . . it is a matter of resting and managing my schedule so that I am not playing too many weeks in a row. If I play two weeks in a row, it is fine. Three weeks, it starts to niggle and after four weeks it starts to hurt and you feel it.”

While McIlroy can bask in his new position of being the seventh-ranked player in the world, one of four Irishmen in the top 100 along with Harrington (10th), Graeme McDowell (46th) and Shane Lowry (87th), there is no such rest for those competing tin the Avantha Masters in India where Lowry, Darren Clarke, Gareth Maybin and Gary Murphy are all in action.

Harrington, meanwhile, competes in the Pebble Beach pro-am – which is also the venue for the US Open in June – as he seeks to regain some sharpness having missed the cut in his seasonal opener at the Los Angeles Open last weekend.