Sir Nick Faldo nailed the Open Championship strategy Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler have convinced themselves to follow in pursuit of victory at Royal Birkdale this week.

Fairways that look like runways and “burned down” rough, which Rory McIlroy said isn’t as penal as it was when he visited a few weeks ago, will tempt so many into making decisions off the tee they could ultimately regret.

Faldo, in giving a drive-by to driver-loving Bryson DeChambeau, suggesting the big-hitting LIV star has “zero clue of strategy” laid out the folly in not thinking your way around an Open course.

“You thread it, don’t you?” he told the Sky Sports podcast.

“You feed it down the fairway, it’s really important. You look at humps and bumps and think, ‘If I send it over and feed it, it nudges back into play.' You don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ll just bomb it down there, can’t see where I’m going, it’s 20 yards wide.'

“Oh, yeah, good luck.”

 

Faldo won three Opens and Rahm, in search of his first, has learned his own links lessons and painted the picture of a week loaded with six-irons off the tee at Birkdale, not just on the long par-threes, either.

“From what I've learned in the past, if you start pulling out drivers in an Open Championship, you can do a good job short term,” he said.

“You can maybe get away with it one round. Over four rounds, you're going to start finding spots you don't want to be in, and you're going to pay the price.”

Rahm pointed to a 2018 experience at Carnoustie, another instance of firm, fast fairways and thinned out rough which moved him to be too aggressive. He missed the cut as a result.

“I tried to hit one too many drivers and ended up going home on Saturday,” he said.

“I think more so than ever, when it's firm, you want to be in the fairway so you can have more control over the golf ball because out of the rough, you start having fliers and the ball can release so much where even if you're 100 yards away, it's tricky to find the greens.

“I think we're going to see a bit of everything; see 6-irons off tees, drivers and long irons into par-4s. It should be a really fun one.”

World No.1 Scheffler, after missing his first cut in four years at the Scottish Open last week, played 27 practice holes at Birkdale before most of the field arrived, using his rare Sunday not contending to assess the conditions and work out his strategy.

His takeaway was the need for “a lot of thinking off the tee”, getting ready for a mentally as well as physically draining few days, knowing also that changing winds remove any chance of predictability.   

“The ball's just going to run for forever, pretty much,” he said.

“The fairways this week are really tight, so you get a lot of cross-winds. They can be difficult to hold just because they're so fast and they're so firm.

“So there's a lot of thinking off the tee on whether or not you want to just hit driver up there somewhere and kind of play from the rough most likely, or do you want to start hitting some irons, getting it in some fairways and hitting some longer shots into the greens?

There will be lots of irons off the tee for Scottie Scheffler this week. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

“On each hole there's a good bit of strategy; there's a decent amount of thinking.

“If it wasn't as firm as it is now, there wouldn't be as much decision-making, but I think with the firmness, it creates a whole lot more challenges, I think, for us as players, just to try to control your ball and figure out where it's going to end up.

“You will get a couple of weird bounces here and there as well.

“You have to be hitting the ball, I think, really sharply around this place if you're going to make some birdies.”

Scheffler said the par-threes, including the new 15th, loomed as “very, very challenging”, which is exactly what McIlroy said he wanted as a major championship test.

As well as the new 15th hole, there have been several other changes at Birkdale since 2017, when Jordan Spieth won a dramatic Open, with greens rebuilt, tees moved, fairways thinned and bunkers relocated across both the front and back nines.

There's some places not to go at Birkdale, as Joaquin Niemann found out during practice. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

McIlroy said posing new questions for professionals who can hit so many different shots was all a course needed to do to create drama, and would bring the best to the fore.

“I think all this dry weather and sun and a little bit of wind is obviously great for the course in one way, but when I was here a couple of weeks ago, the rough was a lot more penal than it's going to be this week. It's definitely burnt out a lot,” he said.

“There may be certain instances where - you know, the big thing, especially off the tee here, is the fairway bunkers and avoiding those. You might see some guys being more aggressive off the tee, taking driver, trying to take the fairway bunkers out of play. Okay, it might be in the rough, but it's not that penal, so you get a wedge in your hand and you can figure it out from there.

Rory McIlroy is all over his Birkdale strategy. (Photo by Warren Little/Getty Images)

 “But it creates a good challenge, and it creates options for if you do miss the green, whether it's a putter, a bump-and-run, some guys might choose lob wedge, and I think what we all know, even going back to Shinnecock [the U.S. Open] a few weeks ago, when you give professional golfers options and you can create a little bit of doubt in their minds in terms of should I play this shot or that shot, that's when things start to get fun, especially for the viewer ... Not so much for us.  

“That to me is the sign of a good championship test.”