“Fiddly hasn’t been my forte”, said Rory McIlroy, but he’s exactly where he needs to be after the first round of the 150th Open.

The favourite for the championship found the Old Course trickier on the first day than he can ever remember. He still shot a six-under 66 to lie just a couple of strokes behind early leader, American Cameron Young.

Four of Rory’s Open rounds on the Old Course look like this: 63-68-69-66. That’s 22-under. The one outlier is the famous 80 in the second round in 2010.

You have to think had the wind not raged that day and that the five-a-sides in 2015 not been played, he might have two more Jugs by now.

‘It’s just really fiddly out there’

You don't see this every day …@McIlroyRory's drive hits a stone marking the original boundary of the Old Course.pic.twitter.com/LQSZQ177Qk

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) July 14, 2022

No matter. He looks poised now for a weekend, having got his head around the difference between the Old Course like this and at other times.

“It’s the fiddliest Open that I’ve played,” he said, to puzzled looks from American journalists. “That’s the only way I can really describe it. It’s just really fiddly out there.

“Carnoustie was firm in 2018, but it wasn’t like this. The 18th at Carnoustie was like a runway.

“But around the greens here and just all the slopes and undulations and everything. As the tournament progresses, you’re going to get some funny bounces and it’s going to test your patience at times.

“I’ve played this course a lot. I haven’t played it a lot in these conditions. And I think I know it pretty well.

“I maybe saw a couple of pin positions I’ve never seen out there today, but apart from that, I thought I handled everything pretty good.

”Fiddly hasn’t really been my forte over the years. But I’m hopefully going to make it my forte this week.”

‘The fairways are so firm’

What an opening round from the 2014 Champion Golfer of the Year 💪@McIlroyRory sits in second place after posting a round of -6️⃣#The150thOpen pic.twitter.com/aHEQXpDklC

— The Open (@TheOpen) July 14, 2022

He’s made adjustments to his bag to cope with how fiddly everything is.

“I’m using a lob wedge with less bounce than I usually do,” he said.. Even still I think I could do with using even less bounce. The fairways are so firm.

“Some of the lies are so bare, That second shot on 17, I felt like if I had a full lob wedge there and I didn’t get it quite right, then I could have thinned the thing into the middle of the road.

“You’re up there leading The Open Championship and you’re worried about hitting a lob wedge out of bounds because of a bare lie off the fairway.

“It’s tricky. And I put a 2-iron in the bag instead of a 5-wood, and I hit that quite a bit today. That’s been a good club this week.”

Maybe a 2022 version of Nick Faldo’s two-wood he used in 1990? That was a “good links club” in those days.

From third from last to leading the Open

Young, from New York City – “it would be a stretch to say from the streets of New York” he admitted – shot 76-77 at Renaissance last week to finish 156th out of 160. He looked like a fish out of water on alien land.

But at super linksy, fiddly St Andrews, he was eight-under 64. As they say in America, go figure.

He’d actually played the Old Course before, on a family trip when just 13 when they also played The New, Kingsbarns, Carnoustie, Gullane, Crail and some others. But his links golf experience amounted to little more than that.

“I don’t think I’ve figured that much of it out, honestl,” he admitted. “You could play every day here for a year and you would just scratch the surface of what you can know about this place.

“I think we probably have seen about 5 percent of what’s out there. There’s a pretty endless amount to take in.

“I shot a million last week, and this week all of a sudden I’m pretty comfortable. There’s been a lot of work and a lot of preparation in between.

“But I know things can change in an instant, especially out here given how important the bounces and the mindset that you have are.”