Three birdies in his last twelve holes kept Shane Lowry’s hopes alive of a first individual tour victory since 2022 at the Dubai Invitational and he admits he is full of belief that he will finally crack the winning code.
Lowry, whose wins tend to be in big tournaments, overcame a slow start of bogeys on the third and fifth to birdie the seventh, ninth and seventeenth while he recovered from a water ball to par the par-5 13th and share second place, two shots behind Nacho Elvira on six-under after a 70.
Lowry has spoken about trying to maintain a positive attitude during tournaments and his desire to keep plugging away for his pro-am team with Jimmy Dunne helped him turn his own fortunes around.
“It was a grind today,” admitted the Clara man who lasted tasted victory at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. “Got off to a bad start. Didn’t really have it early on. A couple of really, really bad mistakes and I just hung in there well, and to be honest I was grinding for our team more than anything. I really wanted to win with Jimmy. We had a great time over the last two days. We got lucky, we got paired together the last two days, and it’s been really nice out there and that’s what this event is about.
“Obviously I’m here to — when it comes into tomorrow, I want to try and win the individual event but I was grinding for our team. I wanted to hole the putt at the end. I didn’t know what way the tie would have left us. I’m happy with my day’s work. Could have been a little bit better.”
The 38-year-old showed great patience to grind out an under par round in testing conditions to ensure he didn’t fall too far off the pace with some lower scores expected tomorrow.
“Yeah it was pretty good because when I got sort of over par early, it’s tricky out there. You know, obviously there’s a few good scores but there’s a lot of average and bad scores out there.
“I just felt like I need to stay patient and keep doing what I was doing and my chances will come. I was happy — I holed a great par putt on 16 and birdied on 17, was nice and I was robbed on the last but what can you do.”
Since his last individual win, Lowry has reached a career-high tenth in the world and starred in two European Ryder Cup victories as well as winning the Zurich Classic as a team with Rory McIlroy, but there’s no praise like self praise and he would dearly love a win of his own.
“It’s the reason I get up in the morning. Try my best. Working as hard as I can, and yeah, hopefully it will come soon.”
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