Green's significant changes to the course will help McIlroy. In 2013, he arrived here as defending champion and spoke fondly of this famous venue, yet in highlighting the fact that driver wasn't often needed, he revealed just why it wasn't really a course for him. Jason Dufner and Jim Furyk dominated, Henrik Stenson just behind them, players who play positional golf rather than the powerful kind McIlroy had put to use at Kiawah Island 12 months earlier.

Now, at close to 7,400 yards and with scores of trees removed, Oak Hill should be less a game of draughts, more a game of chess. There will be options for a player like McIlroy, both off the tee and when faced with a recovery shot. There ought to be more medium irons and fewer short ones, while Andy Johnson of The Fried Egg reckons . That's one area of the McIlroy game which remains vastly underrated.

The rough, made lush through spring, ought to play more into the hands of those who hit the ball a long way. So might the weather, with cold mornings and cool afternoons elongating the course, just as rain will should it arrive as expected. Oak Hill's hard-to-hit fairways might just be a little more receptive and anyone seeking to win the driving battle by sacrificing distance for accuracy will struggle to win the war.

Whether McIlroy's handful of autumn scouting missions benefit him is unclear, but the changes to the course are all but guaranteed to. Oak Hill's 'sympathetic restoration', as Green puts it, has simultaneously brought back the vision of Donald Ross while bringing the course forward into the present day, somewhere to offer an appropriate challenge to the sport as it is now, for better or worse. You simply must drive the ball well.

It is a good place for a golfer like McIlroy, who last arrived at a major on the back of a missed cut in April 2022, then finished second in the Masters. He's never off the radar, never without hope.