{"id":116099,"date":"2025-09-03T16:42:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116099\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T16:42:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:42:09","slug":"rory-mcilroy-with-one-eye-on-bethpage-as-he-plays-irish-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116099\/","title":{"rendered":"Rory McIlroy with one eye on Bethpage as he plays Irish Open"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since The Open ended, Rory McIlroy has been singularly focused on one outstanding goal.<\/p>\n

And now it\u2019s just three weeks away.<\/p>\n

McIlroy is continuing his Ryder Cup preparation this week with another start at home, this time at the DP World Tour\u2019s Irish Open at the K Club. It\u2019s the first of back-to-back events for McIlroy, as he hopes to lead by example for the Europeans as they try to win on foreign soil for the first time since 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Europeans have a wonderful opportunity this year to achieve something very, very special,\u201d McIlroy told reporters Wednesday, \u201cbut it\u2019s also going to be very difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

McIlroy, making his eighth Ryder Cup appearance, is the most veteran member of the European side, and he said that winning a road game is \u201cup there with one of the biggest achievements in the game.\u201d Between controlling the course setup and getting a boost from the partisan crowd, the home side has won the last five cups by an average of 6.6 points.<\/p>\n

European captain Luke Donald finalized his 12-man roster<\/a> earlier this week, bringing back six players from the victorious 2023 squad. McIlroy said that \u201clove(s) the team that Luke has assembled,\u201d with 11 members returning from the squad that won by five points two years ago.<\/p>\n

Now it comes down to execution.<\/p>\n

Justin Rose won the first FedExCup playoff event and Tommy Fleetwood closed out the postseason with his first career PGA Tour victory at the Tour Championship. Bob MacIntyre has kicked on since the U.S. Open. McIlroy himself, meanwhile, has won three times this season, but not since the Masters in April. In his last two starts, McIlroy said that he hit the ball poorly at the BMW Championship (T-12) and putted woefully at the Tour Championship (T-23), and now he\u2019s looking to put all pieces of his game together with one eye on Bethpage.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"2025<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The top two ranked players in the world, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, will headline a rapid-fire, team golf competition later this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are two big weeks to make sure the game is sharp, but I think the only way to tell you\u2019re as sharp as you want to be is getting yourself in contention under pressure and the business end of things on Sunday,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s important to do that. It\u2019s important to give myself a couple of chances to win.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, winning, that would be lovely, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s absolutely necessary going into the Ryder Cup. But it would be great to at least feel really good about my game and looking ahead to Bethpage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since The Open ended, Rory McIlroy has been singularly focused on one outstanding goal. And now it\u2019s just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-116099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}