Rory McIlroy had a week to forget at the FedEx St Jude Championship – but now he wants to put things right…

Rory McIlroy had scarcely picked up a golf club between last month’s Open Championship and his galling return at the FedEx St Jude Championship.

But the glaring concern for McIlroy wasn’t his obvious lack of sharpness after his post-major season break as he toiled in the Memphis heat, but rather that his game was deteriorating the longer the tournament went on.

The Masters winner carded a final round 72 to finish 66th at TPC Southwind, 25 shots behind the runaway champion Scottie Scheffler. McIlroy is 13th in the FedEx Cup standings so will be at the Tour Championship at East Lake, regardless of whether his form improves at the BMW Championship.

But he also knows that his chances of contending for a fourth FedEx Cup title are slim to none if he can’t find a solution to a problem with his swing.

“I’m so far away from where I need to be to even feel like I have a chance. I’ve just got to keep working and hope it turns around a little bit,” he told reporters on Sunday. “Obviously didn’t come in here with a ton of reps, (it) almost felt like the more the week went on the more I felt lost with my golf swing a little bit.

“I guess [it was] nice to shake the rust off a little bit but I’m going to have to work pretty hard between now and next Thursday to feel like I have any sort of golf game to compete next week. To me it’s more about the execution of what I’m doing right now, and the execution wasn’t there this week.”

McIlroy has now returned home to Florida and will work on his game with coach Michael Bannon and caddie Harry Diamond before heading to Bellerive for the second of the three playoff events.

“When you’re sort of working through some stuff in your swing, then sometimes start to lose awareness of the target and start to make the golf swing more important than the golf shots sometimes, and that’s obviously not a good thing either,” McIlroy admitted.

“It’s that happy medium of you wanting to get some feels in the golf swing, but at the same time still trying to play golf out there and just thinking of the golf swing, which after the bad finish on Thursday, I felt like I was just thinking of my golf swing the last few days.

“I felt a little bit better coming in today, but just need to do some work on it.”