{"id":431313,"date":"2026-04-12T00:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T00:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/431313\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T00:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T00:14:11","slug":"the-masters-day-three-rory-mcilroy-loses-big-lead-at-augusta-national-as-shane-lowry-hits-ace-to-close-gap-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/431313\/","title":{"rendered":"The Masters Day Three: Rory McIlroy loses big lead at Augusta National, as Shane Lowry hits ace to close gap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Searching for an omen<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The last time Rory McIlroy walked off the 18th green disappointed to be tied for the lead at -11, he followed it with the greatest moment of his professional life.<\/p>\n<p>-11 was the mark after 72 holes in 2025 and McIlroy responded brilliantly to take control of the playoff with Justin Rose.<\/p>\n<p>McIlroy will be reunited with Cameron Young; they played together in the opening two rounds and this scenario looked very unlikely in the early stages of Thursday when the American was in danger of missing the cut.<\/p>\n<p>This is far from a head to head, though. Sam Burns played quite well today and is one back, while Shane Lowry is nicely positioned if he can get off to a flier.<\/p>\n<p>Jason Day and Justin Rose are a veteran pairing at -8 while Scottie Scheffler and Haotong Li are a familiar combination at -7.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They played alongside each other in the final round at Portrush last year and were spotted laughing and joking as Scheffler fired his way to glory.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that&#8217;s an omen too<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Searching for an omen The last time Rory McIlroy walked off the 18th green disappointed to be tied&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,5952,5951,7,8,135330],"class_list":{"0":"post-431313","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-latest-news","17":"tag-latestnews","18":"tag-main-news","19":"tag-mainnews","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-rory-mcilroy","22":"tag-shane-lowry","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories","25":"tag-us-masters"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116388853507936106","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}