AUSTIN, Texas — Standing on the 12th tee with a picturesque view of the iconic Pennybacker Bridge, Ian Poulter watched his drive safely hit the fairway, flipped his driver, grinned and let out a giggle.
Why wouldn’t the typically jovial Poulter be beaming? He stood 3 up in his opening match of the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play event, in firm control despite coming into Wednesday as a decided underdog.
His opponent, World No. 11 Rory McIlroy, wasn’t sharing in Poulter’s chipper disposition.
Just days after a report that he’d added coach Pete Cowen to his team in an effort to right a struggling ship, McIlroy looked out of sorts again at Austin Country Club.
Despite booming drives that consistently rolled well past Poulter’s, McIlroy fell 6 and 5 in an uninspiring showing that put him a tough spot with two round-robin matches remaining.
Down goes Rory. @IanJamesPoulter defeats McIlroy 6&5 in Round 1 @DellMatchPlay. pic.twitter.com/H7R9wdnSET
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 24, 2021
Poulter said he expects McIlroy to improve under Cowen’s eye, but he was happy to apply some pressure to his friend and earn the victory.
“Obviously, Pete’s going to be working exclusively with Rory on his game. I think there’s a couple of areas of his game which I’m sure he wants to kind of firm up a little bit and obviously, he missed a couple of tee shots left. From that point, he was trying to hit a kind of a bit of a hold-up cut,” Poulter said of his friend. “But it’s Rory, it doesn’t take a lot for Rory to spark up pretty quickly and I wasn’t surprised with anything, I just felt that I kind of, I had done a pretty decent job of putting him under pressure, I made it difficult for him.”
