McIlroy looking comfortable as final prep work is done at sundrenched Portrush

Mark McGowan at Royal Portrush

“When the sun shines, there’s nowhere better!” That’s a common refrain whenever this little island is drenched in sun, but there may be nowhere where it’s more true than on the fairways at Royal Portrush.

The weather always plays a key role in any Open Championship – and likely will again over the four tournament days though not the brutal winds and rain that battered Royal Troon last year (fingers crossed) – but for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, it was glorious.

Rory McIlroy, playing alongside Christiaan Bezuidenhout and Louis Oosthuizen, was in good spirits, laughing and joking with his playing partners, enjoying a walk along with his father, Gerry, who’d just arrived, and continuing to fine-tune his game.

McIlroy played 18 holes on Monday and Tuesday – the latter in the company of Tom McKibbin and Darren Clarke – and nine on Wednesday, allowing himself something of a lie-in compared to the previous two days.

The 2019 Open is not one Rory will look back on all that fondly, but it did provide a valuable lesson. Back then, he tried to treat it as though it were any other major championship, and thus, the rapturous reception he received on the first tee box was out of the ordinary. It unsettled him, and the rest is history.

This time around, he’s embracing the madness. It’s all he can do, really, because there is no escaping it. He learned that the hard way six years ago.

Rory will never be unpopular in Northern Ireland – he’s unlikely to be unpopular anywhere with the possible exception of Bethpage in New York this September – but the ups-and-downs he’s experienced in the six years between Opens at Portrush have only served to heighten the esteem in which he’s held, and to deepen the love the Irish fans have for him and he’s repaid that love by becoming the first Irishman to win the Masters.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the reception he receives on Thursday may even be louder than that in 2019. That tightening of the chest and butterflies in the stomach he felt and fell victim to six years ago will return, but at least this time he’ll be ready for them.

He’ll not be the only one feeling intense pressure when he steps onto the first tee box. With out-of-bounds left and right, the tee sheltered by the grandstand so educated guesses are the best they can hope for with the wind, it’s among the most daunting tee shots on the Open rota. Certainly in Pádraig Harrington’s mind anyway.

He readily admits that he’ll be a bag of nerves when he has the honour of getting the tournament underway on Thursday morning, but it’s not just the first hole that has the ability to derail championships early.

Four of the first five holes have white stakes, and the way the golf course is laid out means that there are very few bailout options. If you try to take the fairway bunkers out of play altogether, you’re leaving yourself a really long way back and playing to greens where trouble lurks all around. Quite simply, it’s the perfect risk-reward challenge.

Everybody will make mistakes, everybody will make bogeys, and plenty will make doubles and more, but the player who wins this week will have to be accurate off the tee and aggressive at times. They’ll need their short game to be on point and they’ll have to accept that some times, missing the green is a better result if the pin is in the right location.

The course might be slightly different to the one that Rory burned up in 61 strokes as a 16-year-old amateur, but the examination it sets is very similar. Rory’s 45-hole cramming sessions over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are effectively the last-minute refreshers on a topic he’s incredibly well-versed on and on and he’ll be well-prepared for the test he’ll sit over 72 [hopefully] holes.