Ludvig Aberg, who carded a 71, is set to miss the cut by one shot, while Jon Rahm is poised to squeeze into the weekend after a superb 65 lifted him to two under.<\/p>\n
Rory McIlroy, who shared the first-round lead with other players, was among the late starters on Friday.<\/p>\n
In contrast to Scheffler’s troubles, playing partner Matt Fitzpatrick thrived to move within one of the clubhouse lead set by fellow Englishman Jordan Smith.<\/p>\n
Fitzpatrick, chasing a fourth win of the season, laid the groundwork with five birdies in a row from the 11th – his second hole – to charge up the leaderboard.<\/p>\n
That momentum proved difficult to maintain as Fitzpatrick mixed three bogeys with three birdies thereafter in a 65 to reach eight under.<\/p>\n
“Just felt like I did everything pretty solid. I feel fortunate enough to say that a lot this year,” said Fitzpatrick.<\/p>\n
“This stretch of sort of March, February onwards to now, it’s definitely the best golf I’ve played in my career.”<\/p>\n
Smith, the world number 82, benefited from a recent break as he tore round in 63 to set the target at nine under.<\/p>\n
“I had three weeks off, put the clubs away for a week and then came back re-energised and looking forward to this next stretch,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Things are feeling good. I’m in a good mental space and just need to keep it going.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ludvig Aberg, who carded a 71, is set to miss the cut by one shot, while Jon Rahm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-543080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543080","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=543080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}