Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen<\/a>.<\/p>\nHe put himself in pole position for victory after landing a birdie on the final hole to complete a bogey-free round of 66 to leave both McIlroy and Neergaard-Petersen requiring eagles to force a play-off.<\/p>\n
While the Dane faltered, the Northern Irishman sunk his putt from around 15 feet to extend the tournament into extra time – but it was Fitzpatrick who prevailed after both players missed the green with their respective approach shots.<\/p>\n
Fitzpatrick told Sky Sports: “He [McIlroy] is one of only a few where you know you are going to a play-off. You are two clear with one to play and you know you are going to a play-off because he did it again in typical Rory fashion.<\/p>\n
“I struggled at the start of the year obviously and to turn it round in the summer like I did, have the Ryder Cup like I did which is hard to top but the way I played today — there was one bad shot all day. So proud of myself.”<\/p>\n
Tommy Fleetwood was in a group of four players, including Neergaard-Petersen, who tied for third place after a final round 67, while Tyrrell Hatton, the only man to start the final day with a faint hope of denying McIlroy the Road to Dubai title, fell away to finish in a share of 14th.<\/p>\n
McIlroy expressed some degree of disappointment, having started the final round in style and moving clear at the top of the leaderboard after going four-under through the first seven holes.<\/p>\n
But he expressed pride at surpassing the late Seve Ballesteros — a six-time Race to Dubai winner — and set his sights on catching and surpassing Montgomerie.<\/p>\n
He said: “It’s amazing, I had a conversation with Carmen [Ballesteros’ ex wife] before I went out to play today and she told me how proud he would have been.<\/p>\n
“I want it [eight titles], of course I do. I was the first European to win the Grand Slam and I would love to be the European with the most wins in terms of the Order of Merit and season long races.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matt Fitzpatrick overcame Rory McIlroy to win in Dubai.\u00a0Getty Matt Fitzpatrick defied a dramatic late fightback from Rory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-289962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289962","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=289962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}