At what point do we start worrying about Rory?

The simple answer to this question, you would hope, is that we’re not even close to even begin to start fretting about Rory McIlroy. He’s still in his 20s, he’s already got four majors in the locker and he’s the World No. 5.

In the coming weeks he’ll play in the Nedbank Challenge before signing off in Dubai, a tournament he has finished 9-W-2-5-W-11-5-3 in his last eight visits. A third win at the World Tour Championship and we can all start firing up the questions about Augusta, a fifth major, and world dominance again.

At the start of every week, unless Tiger Woods is in the field, he’s still the one everyone flocks to on the range, he’s the one whose slo-mo driver swing we’re treated to on a daily basis on social media and he’s the one most of us expect to run away with the tournament by half a dozen shots. He’s already done everyone by eight in a couple of majors so why not?

When the often-repeated question comes up of who’s the best player in the game McIlroy’s name features more often than not, with the little saver that ‘on his day’ he’s the governor.

Earlier just this year Jason Day said this of him: “He has the tools to be Tiger-esque. Obviously Tiger is Tiger but to be in the same sentence as Tiger is pretty unique and special to be able to say that. He has the ability to go out and win more majors than he has right now and I am sure that’s what he wants to do.”

For the record Tiger had 10 of his current 14 majors by this stage of his career.

Since McIlroy’s last major triumph, when he picked up the PGA Championship just three weeks after landing his first Open at Hoylake, Jordan Spieth and Brooks Koepka now have three big ones to their names while Day, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Patrick Reed and Francesco Molinari have all got off the mark.

Justin Rose’s major ‘drought’ goes back to his lone success in 2013 but he seems to be getting better with every season and now we’ve also got Tiger back as a very definite major contender again.

This year, we hoped, everything would click again for the one-time boy wonder. At Augusta even the locals were behind McIlroy as he went out in the final pairing with Reed. But within one sprayed opening tee shot, he actually made par, the memory of Saturday’s 65 was a distant one and the Masters heebie jeebies, albeit adding a fifth straight top-10 finish here, seemed to return. He would shoot a 74 to finish six back.

Lengthy preparations at Shinnecock and its Long Island surrounds went to pot with an opening 80 to make it a hat-trick of successive US Open missed cuts while Carnoustie, where he made his Open debut while still an amateur, saw a rock-solid week, laced with some trademark McIlroy brilliance with that eagle at the 14th. But in the end Molinari was just too good for him and everyone else. No disgrace, the Italian just swatted the lot of them away.

The Sunday of the PGA Championship at Bellerive was all about two players dressed head to toe in Nike but neither of them were McIlroy.

Next year there will be the never-ending questions about how he’s going to try and quieten his mind as he turns the courtesy car down Magnolia Lane, then it will be on to Bethpage Black for the PGA in its new May home, somewhere he backed into a top 10 with a closing 68 in the 2009 US Open as well as a couple of decent finishes in two editions of The Barclays.

His Pebble Beach record, the venue for the US Open, shows a MC in 2010 and just one appearance in this year’s AT&T, where a 72 wasn’t enough to make the final day.

All of which will pale into insignificance given that he will likely spend large chunks of the first six months of the year recalling the 61 that he shot at Royal Portrush in July 2005 when still a 16-year-old amateur.

Yes, he did birdie the last five holes. Yes, it was rounded up to a 65.

This week just gone in Shanghai might have represented a chance to get back to winning ways at a tournament where he had five top 10s. A chance to dominate, like three of those major wins, from the outset before blowing the lot of them away.

“I feel like it’s a good course for me. It does suit the long hitters because of the four par 5s and the two drivable par 4s, but you need to putt your ball in play. So you need to hit it long but you can’t hit it all over the place here. You need to put it in play if you want any chance of scoring well,” he said at the start of the week.

At the end of it he was third last in the 77-man field for driving accuracy and 56th for putts per Greens In Regulation. In the end he was 24 shots behind Xander Schauffele and Tony Finau.

All these things happen of course. For even the greatest, relatively speaking, it comes and it goes but since Valhalla in 2014 the golfing world has moved on at some pace. Thomas had only played in one major at that point and the likes of Schauffele and Bryson DeChambeau were still amateurs.

One of many upsides is that McIlroy will see the absence of any of the big four on his recent CV as part and parcel of the game. When the victorious European team sat and answered questions after reclaiming the Ryder Cup it was McIlroy who appeared to be Thomas Bjorn’s on-course right-hand man. He generally speaks with a maturity beyond his years and, while others might try a bit too hard to be funny, he carries it off with a natural ease.

When he did capture his fourth major, at the age of just 25, his answers that night in Kentucky, even in the afterglow of such a brilliant comeback and with questions of chasing Jack Nicklaus’ record, demonstrated a sense of the real world.

“I think I’ve got to take it one small step at a time. I think the two next realistic goals are the career Grand Slam, and trying to become the most successful European player ever. Nick Faldo has six. Seve has five,” he said.

“Right now, that’s what my focus is. My focus is trying to complete this year Grand Slam and then move forward and try and become the most successful European ever, and hopefully in time, if I can do that, then I can move on and set different goals.”

Not many would have thought he’s be stuck in the same spot four years on. For the record we’ve got 165 days until The Masters gets underway.