Rory McIlroy's Open hopes blown away at windy Troon by a ...

Making the cut, as McIlroy admitted afterwards, is the height of his ambitions now.

The 35-year was level par approaching the famous par-three 8th known as the Postage Stamp where he found a bunker off the tee, took two to emerge from it and eventually posted a damaging double bogey.

A par at the 9th was followed with a bogey five on the first hole home having found the rough off the tee. His opener from the famous and dangerous 11th, known as the Railway, duly found its way out of bounds and onto the tracks.

First stop: Nowheresville.

Another double bogey was the end result there.

That was five shots lost over that quick quartet of holes and it wasn’t just the numbers that were a concern. McIlroy’s body language throughout this was all eyes to the heavens and shakes of the head. None of it good.

“Difficult day,” he admitted. “I felt like I did okay for the first part of the round then missed the green at the Postage Stamp, left it in and made a double, but I felt like I was still in reasonable shape being a couple over through nine.

“I felt like I could maybe get a few of those shots back on the back nine by shooting even par or something like that and then hitting the ball out of bounds on 11 and making a double there... Even the wind on the back nine, it was helping [but] it was a lot off the left.

“I was surprised by how difficult the back nine played. I thought we were going to get it a little easier than we did. The course played tough.

“The conditions were very difficult in a wind we haven’t seen so far this week and I guess when that happens, you play your practise rounds and you have your strategy that you think is going to get you around the golf course.

“But then when you get a wind that you haven’t played in it starts to present different options and you start to think about maybe hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practise. Just one of those days where I didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions.” 

Three pars followed his horrendous spell around the turn but another bogey followed on the par-four 15th to take him to six-over par and outside the top 100 in the field with 27 of the 157-strong field still to tee off.

More trouble off the tee left him scrambling for safety at 18 and the par putt that waved at the hole as it passed by sat as a fitting ending to his day. It left the former winner with a long afternoon and evening to come, and the same tomorrow morning.

This was the fourth time in his last five Opens that McIlroy hasn’t been able to break par on the Thursday, although it won’t even rank as the worst of those given he shot a disastrous eight-over 79 on day one at Royal Portrush in 2019.

And duly missed the cut.

The hope here was that he had been able to digest the events at Pinehurst last month when three bogeys on the last four holes cost them that US Open title and a first major in a decade. A solid showing at the Scottish Open last week suggested he had.

The reality was very different but he didn’t go along with the theory that it had been just too much of an ask to work through all that scar tissue from North Carolina and then rediscover the required intensity here in such a short space of time.

“No. I wouldn’t say so. I just think that your misses get punished a lot more this week than even last week. Whether you hit it in the fairway bunkers or the rough. The balls that I hit in the rough today, the lies were pretty nasty so I just think you get penalised more for your misses.” The greatest penalty being another nine-month wait for another crack at that elusive fifth major.