Rory McIlroy backed up his pre-tournament prediction in brilliant fashion with a superb 65 as Open champion Phil Mickelson suffered an astonishing collapse in the first round of the WGC-HSBC Cham- pions in Shanghai yesterday.
Without a win all season, McIlroy is a lowly 62nd on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai and needs to move into the top 60 this week to have a chance of qualifying for the DP World Tour championship in November.
The 24-year-old insisted he was more likely to win in Shanghai than miss out on a trip to Dubai and was as good as his word at the Sheshan club, carding eight birdies and just one bogey to finish seven under par.
That gave the Northern Irishman a two-shot lead over Spain’s Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano, who won the BMW Masters across the city at Lake Malaren on Sunday, and Welshman Jamie Donaldson.
US Open champion Justin Rose, Bubba Watson, Jordan Spieth and Tommy Fleetwood are a shot further back on four under.
Mickelson had briefly shared the lead with Mc- Ilroy when he picked up his sixth birdie of the day on the seventh – having started from the 10th – but ran up a quadruple-bogey 9 on the eighth.
After seeing his third shot come up short of the flag and roll down a bank into water guarding the green, Mickelson took a penalty drop and then span his fifth shot from the drop zone back into the same hazard. The left-hander finally found the putting surface with his seventh shot and two-putted, but compounded his misery by hitting his approach to the ninth into the water to the right of the green.
That led to a bogey 5 and meant Mickelson had to settle for an opening 71, one under par.
McIlroy won five times in 2012, including a second major title by eight shots, to finish top of the money lists on both side of the Atlantic, but his only win this season came in an 18-hole exhibition match against Tiger Woods on Monday.
The Northern Irishman said: “I’ve tried to stay patient and I know that if I am working on the right things, then things will start to fall into place sooner or later.”