Paul McGinley insists Rory McIlroy will have to raise his standards even higher if he is to consistently compete with the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele who he admits have moved the needle to a level not seen since Tiger Woods was at his best.
Ahead of the season ending DP World Tour Championship where McIlroy can win his sixth Race to Dubai title and potentially notch his fourth win of the season, McGinley believes the world number three has had a very good season but that the standard required to win major championships is higher now than it was when he won four between 2011 and 2014 while he also has to battle a greater depth of field.
World number one Scheffler won seven times on the PGA Tour including the Masters, PLAYERS Championship and Olympic Gold, while Schauffele won the PGA Championship and Open Championship in the same summer. McGinley feels it will be difficult for 35-year-old McIlroy to keep pace with the top two players in the world as he looks to end an eleven-year major drought.
“I think Rory has had a very good season,” McGinley said in his DP World Tour Championship column. “His stats have all been pretty good this year. I think he’s a more rounded golfer than he’s ever been before. But the problem he’s got is that the bar has raised. The bar is a lot higher than it was when he was winning Major Championships ten years ago.
“Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler are playing golf to a standard and level that we haven’t seen since Tiger Woods. Consistently, their statistics show that. Certainly, Scottie Scheffler this year has gone down as one of the best recorded statistical seasons, winning seven times. Schauffele is not far behind him and is a better putter than him, but his statistics through the bag are phenomenal.
“The bar has never been higher for Rory to compete in. The environment has never been tougher. So, I think he’s had a good season, but he knows himself that he’s going to have to do something extraordinary to take down those two players, who have moved the needle quite a bit.”
McGinley who sits on a Ryder Cup advisory board for Team Europe feels the DP World Tour is in a position of strength after a very successful season in the first year of a new look schedule which has seen some high quality events on a consistent basis since August.
“It’s been a very good year for the DP World Tour in very challenging times. We have really thrived and done well, particularly since the FedExCup finished in September. I think we’ve had some great storylines since then, some great events to get the top players coming back and populate a lot of those fields. We had Jon Rahm playing well in Spain, Rory McIlroy playing well in the events he played in, Tommy Fleetwood too, as well as the European players who have been playing all year on the DP World Tour and competing well against the world’s best players.
“I think the new-look schedule panned out well. The Genesis Scottish Open was another huge success, a great performance again by Robert MacIntyre and we’ve been fortunate in so far as the big names at each event, whether they be a home player or maybe the favourite, have done well. Angel Hidalgo did brilliantly at the Spanish Open, going head-to-head against Rahm and taking him down. It’s been overall a pretty good season, with really good storylines across various events.”
Read McGinley’s column in full HERE
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