Ryder Cup 2023: Redemption for Rory McIlroy but no chat with Joe LaCava yet

“It means an awful lot,” admitted McIlroy after rounding off his week with a polished performance to beat Sam Burns 3&1 in the singles. “I was so disappointed after Whistling Straits. We all were. And we wanted to come here to Rome this year and redeem ourselves a bit.

“We've got some fresh blood on the team that I think has worked really, really well. I just knew that I needed to put in a better performance for my team-mates this week and, thankfully, I was able to do that.”

McIlroy had been raging as he left Marco Simone Golf & Country Club on Saturday night after tensions exploded following a fall-out over LaCava, one of the most experienced caddies in the game, walking on McIlroy’s line on the 18th green.

It had been claimed that McIlroy had met LaCava, Tiger Woods’ ex-caddie and now working for Patrick Cantlay, on Sunday morning, but that wasn’t the case. “We haven't seen each other face-to-face, but we've text and everything will be fine. But it's a point of contention and it still hurts, but time is a great healer and we'll all move on.”

As different angles of the incident emerged, there was no denying that LaCava had been the guilty party on Saturday night as he committed what is one of the cardinal sins in professional golf.

“I was hot coming out of that yesterday. I was pretty angry,” admitted McIlroy. “We talked about it as a team last night. We felt like it was disrespectful, and it wasn't just disrespectful to Fitz and I. It was disrespectful to the whole team. But I think I let it fuel the fire today and it focused me and I was able to go out there and get my point.”

McIlroy said his anger in the car had been directed at LaCava but expressed to Jim ‘Bones’ Mackay, another of the American caddies. “He was the first American I saw after I got out of the locker room so he was the one that took the brunt of it,” he said. “He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I text Bones this morning and apologised for that.”

Before facing Burns in the concluding session, McIlroy revealed he’d taken inspiration from the writings of a Roman Emperor. “I read a few quotes from the great Marcus Aurelius so that put me in the right frame of mind. I am a big follower of stoicism, so if anyone was going to get in my head it was going to be Marcus. I just thought as a former emperor of Rome and seeing that we are in Rome, it would be a good time to revisit some of his thoughts. So I revisited them on the way to the course today.”