SLYNC.IO DUBAI DESERT CLASSIC

January 28, 2022

Rory McIlroy

Emirates Golf Club

Quick Quotes

Q. Thanks for coming along for a little chat. 66, one of the best scores of the afternoon. Could it have been lower?

RORY McILROY: Could have been way lower. I certainly hit the ball well enough for it to be lower. I missed a few opportunities, but with the way these new greens are, they get a bit chewed up in the afternoons and start to wiggle a little bit if there's in the a lot of speed on them but they are pretty quick as well and you don't want to be giving them too much of a run at the hole.

So yeah, I certainly hit the ball as good as I've done in a long time, and it could have been a few better but 66 this afternoon is a good score and sets me up for a nice weekend.

Q. Went to the range after the round yesterday, did you find something?

RORY McILROY: A little bit. Golf is sort of a game of opposites, the more you try to get the club out in front of you on the way back, the for it wants to try to get behind you on the way down. I've been trying so hard to keep the club in front of me, that it started to get behind me coming down. I got underneath a few of them today but it was better just turning on to trying to keep the club on plane on the way down and then I can basically hit it with my body rotation especially with my hands. I thought I hit my irons a lot better today and was in control of the driver a bit better, too.

With how I ended last year, I certainly found something. Got a bit of momentum. Won on the PGA TOUR, had a really good chance to win here in Dubai at the end of last season. It feels good. There's so many ebbs and flows in this game and the career is so long that it's sort of hard to compare one year to the next and how you're feeling and how you're hitting it.

But I think looking back on my last 12, 14 years or whatever it's been, the body of work is there, and I've played well and I haven't felt so good and I played poorly when I felt really good. It's just a matter of keep showing up each and every day and try to putt the lowest score possible on the scorecard and move on.