Jordan Spieth, Matt Kuchar, Brooks Koepka lead after Day 1

“It was fun, I had a few friends out”. So I kept a good, positive attitude. The generation that includes Lee Westwood (age 44), Poulter (41), Paul Casey (39), Luke Donald (39), Rose (36) and Ross Fisher (36) has bunched itself onto leader boards for long enough that they look at home up there.

It simply wouldn’t be an Open Championship without winds and rain playing havoc with the field, and that’s exactly what happened to several early players.

“I just got off to such a poor start”.

Johnson, the No. 1 player who hasn’t played the weekend at a major since the British Open past year, managed only one birdie on a decent day for scoring and shot 71.

Matt Kuchar admitted he couldn’t wait to kick back and relax watching his rivals in action after battling the conditions at Royal Birkdale on Friday.

Five bogeys greeted the first six holes, but the Northern Irishman dug deep to produce a comeback. That constitutes heavy lifting in Koepka’s world.

It called to mind a statistic that seems peculiar in totality: No Englishman has won the Open Championship since Nick Faldo in 1992, and no Englishman has won any of the nine Opens contended at Royal Birkdale. That translates into results that I’ve seen in my swing on the course this year.

“(I’ve) just got to be patient with myself and understand that it’s been a while since I’ve been in a position to contend other than the Byron Nelson this year.

“But I feel great right now”.

McIlroy has missed the cut at three of his last four tournaments – the U.S. Open, the Irish Open and the Scottish Open – and said he was “nervous … anxious, timid” as he teed off alongside Dustin Johnson and Charl Schwartzel in one of the marquee afternoon groups.

That’s not a problem for Koepka.

But, with the rain giving way, wind easing and patches of blue sky beginning to emerge, conditions eased and scoring improved, although after four hours’ play only 10 players were under par.

Koepka navigated through the challenging weather with 16 pars and two bogeys.

That makes it hard to say he is anything more than just another contender among many at Birkdale, the par-70 links in the town of Southport, on the Lancashire coast of north-west England. Yesterday, at the same point after three birdies in six holes, he had again been reinstalled as the tournament favourite at 15-1.

“A awful lie in the bunker”, he said. “Luckily, it went in”.

He wasn’t rusty. He was ready.

“To be under par for this championship after the way I started, I’m ecstatic with that”, he said afterwards.

“I wish I was here being the number one player in the world and won a couple more majors and whatever but I haven’t”. “Three-wood should have been okay to go up in the air on that sort of flight but I didn’t mean to pitch it so far back”.

“I just had to turn it around”, he said.

“I gain confidence from that, and understand that it is having the impact that I want it to have”. It’s amusing, I’ll play with my dad and shoot 75 every time or higher.