LEADERBOARD<\/a><\/p>\nAmerican duo Rickie Fowler and Sam Burns are a stroke off the lead, two clear of a group which includes Austria’s Sepp Straka.<\/p>\n
Matt Fitzpatrick is in a large group on 10-under-par with fellow Englishman Tommy Fleetwood among those level with McIlroy.<\/p>\n
McIlroy made a strong start, eagling the second and adding two more birdies, before dropping shots either side of another pair of birdies after the turn.<\/p>\n
“I feel like I wasted a few shots out there or at least just wasn’t efficient with my scoring and didn’t capitalise on my good start the last couple of days,” he told Sky Sports.<\/p>\n
“I played pretty good but with the weather coming in on Sunday, tomorrow’s going to be a really important day to get yourself in position.<\/p>\n
“Sunday looks like it could be pretty messy and a lot of things could happen, so the closer you are to the lead Sunday the better. Even if I am a few behind going into Sunday, everyone will have a chance given those conditions.”<\/p>\n
Bhatia carded an eagle and six birdies in an eight-under-par round of 64 at Spyglass Hill to move alongside overnight leader Hisatsune at 15-under.<\/p>\n
After his 67 on Thursday, Lowry had to settle for a second-round 69. Starting at the 10th, he to to the turn three under for his round, but back-to-back bogeys on 10 and 11 halted his momentum.<\/p>\n
He recovered with birdies at four and eight – his 13th and 17th holes of the round – to stay in the hunt for a good weekend.<\/p>\n
World number one Scottie Scheffler picked up five shots in his last seven holes to move to six-under-par.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rory McIlroy insists he is still in contention after reaching the halfway mark of the AT&T Pebble Beach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-297776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}