The Open Championship is going to have a very different feel this week. Just ask Jon Rahm…

It’s as exciting as it is potentially “unprecedented.”

Jon Rahm only further whetted the appetite for this baked-out Open Championship when he strolled into the Royal Birkdale interview room this morning.

The Southport links is looking gloriously brown, the fairways running firm and incredibly fast, and it is only Tuesday, with more sunshine to beat down on the course before go time on Thursday.

Not since Francesco Molinari’s win at Carnoustie eight years ago have the fairways been this hard at an Open venue. A younger and less battle-hardened Rahm missed the cut after a second round 78 on that occasion on the Angus links, but nowadays the Spaniard is a different animal.

“I may draw a little bit of inspiration from Carnoustie because right now it’s playing somewhat similar,” Rahm said. “I thought, ‘oh, the rough is thin. You can miss fairways, and I try to hit one too many drivers and ended up going home on Saturday.’

“From what I’ve learned in the past, if you start pulling out drivers in an Open Championship, you can do a good job short term. You can maybe get away with it one round. Over four rounds, you’re going to start finding spots you don’t want to be in, and you’re going to pay the price.

“More so than ever, when it’s firm, you want to be in the fairway so you can have more control over the golf ball, because out of the rough you start having fliers and the ball can release so much where even if you’re 100 yards away, it’s tricky to find the greens. Putting the ball where you need to put it off the tee is going to be important.”

Rahm, therefore, is predicting irons off tees to be the theme of the week. They will run forever, and if weaved between bunkers, will leave only wedges into plenty of greens.

Driver, though, is still in play as an aggressive option.

“It definitely is,” he confirmed. “On 16 [a 393-yard par-4] yesterday, playing with Josele [Ballester], he hit driver, and if you hit it on line, he definitely would have reached.

“If it wasn’t on the green, it would have been very close. The problem is how difficult is it going to be with a wayward drive when you can hit 6-iron, wedge? That’s what you need to gauge.

“If we have the same wind on a Sunday and somebody needs to make up strokes, yeah, it could be a very viable option. It would be hard to say. On a hole like 11, it’s much narrower, maybe a little bit more difficult to do so. 16 was a bit more feasible depending on the pin location.”

So what will Rahm’s strategy be off the tee this week?

“It all depends on the wind,” Rahm said. “With the wind we had yesterday, we all hit 5- or 6-iron on 11 and still almost reached that bunker on the left. We hit 5- or 6-irons on 16 and some people reached the bunker on the left. [On the 10th], you could make an argument for a 5-iron as well, and if it keeps getting firmer and stays warm with the same wind direction, you could have quite a few holes where that 6-iron is going 280 yards.

“It’s unprecedented for sure.”

Rahm believes Birkdale’s distinction from the other Open venues is in its brutality, particularly since major changes made back in 2024 ahead of this tournament.

“They’ve made it narrower. They’ve added bunkers, moved fairways closer to hazards, added longer tees,” he added.

“On a golf course that was already difficult, they’ve made it more difficult.”