As the day wore on, the length of time spent on the course increased and the afternoon groups were the ones which bore the brunt of the delays.<\/p>\n
McIlroy was playing alongside England’s Tommy Fleetwood and American Justin Thomas, with the group needing four hours just to get through the opening 11 holes.<\/p>\n
“That is extraordinary,” said former European Ryder Cup player Oliver Wilson, who is working as a BBC Radio 5 Live analyst at Portrush. <\/p>\n
“It’s a combination of things – the golf course just holds people up.<\/p>\n
“When you’re teeing off at 3:10pm it means the round will be extraordinary long – but it’s one of the challenges of the Open.”<\/p>\n
England’s Justin Rose believed the wet and wild conditions – making the Dunluce Links even more treacherous – were the biggest factor.<\/p>\n
“It can happen sometimes. It got blustery as the day went on, so it was tricky – there were not many tap-in pars and go,” said Rose, who is two under and was the only player to shoot a bogey-free round.<\/p>\n
“There were a lot of five footers, with guys marking and reading putts.<\/p>\n
“There was a lot of grinding going on, which does take a while.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the day wore on, the length of time spent on the course increased and the afternoon groups…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-18817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}