• Out of Bounds

McIlroy must learn from mistakes

Rory McIlroy suffered a horror end to his 2011 Masters challenge © PA Photos

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Rory McIlroy will emerge stronger from his horror Sunday at The Masters but he will need to analyse things to ensure the same mistakes are not made again.

Much has been written and talked about what happened to McIlory at Augusta. It was a result of pressure, which he will always face if he wants to challenge at the business end of tournaments. Lee Westwood has revealed that when under pressure, McIlroy does have a duck hook in his bag. The youngster might not be too happy to see one of his fellow pros saying it but it's true.

The duck hook started the meltdown, the putter sealed his fate, but in between there was still a chance to remedy things. Having chipped from someone's garden back on to the fairway on 10, McIlroy had options. He chose the wrong one. At 270 yards to the green, taking a fairway wood was a high-risk strategy. His thought process was to try and make par, which was an outside scenario in the extreme. A better option would have been to lay up with an iron to his ideal distance for a wedge and attempt to get up and down for a bogey.

A bogey would have left him with a share of the lead, instead he went for broke - made a complete hash of things and walked off the green with a triple-bogey seven.

Things unravelled from there, as the suspect putting that had kept the rest of the field in the hunt over the first three days came back to bite him. The putting stroke was shaky on 11 and 12 but it was obvious that he was in a state of total bewilderment at having thrown away the lead in such spectacular fashion.

Looking back to what happened on 10, McIlroy had it in his mind that he could make a near-impossible par. We are not party to what conversation the 21-year-old had with his caddie but JP Fitzgerald should have ripped the wood out of his charge's hand and given him an eight iron.

McIlroy's caddie JP Fitzgerald has to play a key part in aiding his player © PA Photos

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Golf is a pretty lonely game; it is you against the course, but you do have an ally in the shape of your caddie. A caddie's job is far more than carrying the bag, working out the yardage and handing over the club. The caddie is in effect the devil and the angel that sit on the shoulder. The player will make the ultimate decision but the caddie must weigh up the situation and decide when is the time to gamble and the time to play safe.

To gamble on the fairway at 10 was never the right choice.

McIlory knows full well that he made mistakes but there were positives to take and he needs to draw on them as the season progresses. For three rounds McIlory was on another level to the rest of the field. He drove the ball superbly and his iron play was a joy to behold. The putting was not great as he missed a string of putts from inside ten feet, but that was what kept his rivals within hailing distance.

His was a dramatic collapse with many likening it to Greg Norman's demise against Nick Faldo in 1996. Norman never won another major, but he was 41 at the time of his defeat - 20 years McIlroy's senior. Far better comparisons are with Dustin Johnson and Nick Watney who suffered collapses at last season's US Open and US PGA Championship respectively. Both Johnson and Watney have emerged stronger players on the back of throwing away leads at major championships. Johnson won the BMW Championship at Cog Hill in September before finishing second in the Cadillac Championship in March, beaten by a certain Nick Watney.

McIlroy gets back into the saddle immediately with a trip to Asia for the Maybank Malaysian Open and win or lose he needs to remember that just four days ago people were talking about him as a future multiple major winner.

Out of Bounds still believes that to be the case - one bad round does not mean he is all of a sudden a bad player.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.