Fleetwood raised hopes of an emotional victory when he holed a monster 75-foot birdie putt on the first hole before adding further gains at the fifth and eighth.<\/p>\n
But he bogeyed the ninth after an overly aggressive approach from the fairway and dropped shots at the next two holes to fall out of the mix. <\/p>\n
The 35-year-old birdied the final two holes to share fourth place alongside world number one Scottie Scheffler, but his post-round reflections were still tinged with disappointment. <\/p>\n
“It was on [a victory]. I was eight under and stood in the middle of the ninth fairway, so I was in a great position, and I was playing really well,” added Fleetwood, who returned the ninth top-10 major finish of his career.<\/p>\n
“At nine, I hit it in the place that you can’t hit it – over the back. It was gusty on that fairway. It was just a terrible mistake.”<\/p>\n
He added: “People are going to make bogeys. Of course they are; it’s tough. Every afternoon it’s been the toughest conditions.”<\/p>\n
“We had a great chance. I just couldn’t quite do it.”<\/p>\n
Fleetwood’s next bid for the Claret Jug will be over the Old Course at St Andrews next year before the Open returns to north-west England at Royal Lytham & St Annes in 2028.<\/p>\n
“How lucky am I to have three Open venues on the rota where really it’s so close to home for me,” he said.<\/p>\n
“People don’t play events that close, let alone home town and then Lytham and Royal Liverpool. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fleetwood raised hopes of an emotional victory when he holed a monster 75-foot birdie putt on the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-700431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}