The US Open began last month without Tiger Woods and no obvious winner.

With one staggering performance, Rory McIlroy made it a championship to remember and made himself the man to beat in the British Open at Royal St Georges this week.

St Georges is way down in the south of England on the Kent coast and it is a course that has been derided by some as quirky, which is most often a golf pros euphemism for ‘unfair'.

Jack Nicklaus was no fan, telling Australian Mike Harwood at the 1993 Open that there was nothing "a small nuclear explosion couldn't fix".

That championship turned out to be one of the great ones. Nick Faldo, the defender, had the lead on Saturday night and shot 67 on Sunday but lost out to Greg Norman's "I was in awe of myself" 64.

The scoring that afternoon bordered on the unbelievable as Faldo, Norman and Bernhard Langer fought to the end but Norman played his finest round that afternoon.

Since then, the course has been lengthened a little to compensate for the ravages of modern club and ball. There are two par threes in the 220-metre range and the par-four 4th hole might be the most difficult in Britain. Coming right after one of the aforementioned short holes and a stern opener it makes for a difficult beginning to the round.

St Georges is a fine course with holes constantly changing direction and forcing players to continually adjust to winds from different quarters. There are unusual holes including the 4th with its small, false-fronted green coming at the end of 440 metres of tumbling ground, the dogleg-left par four 5th and the hogs-backed 10th hole up the hill to a green no-one wants to miss. Every links worth anything has a share of unusual holes because that is the nature of the unpredictable dune land right on the edge of the sea.

Players now, and their generation are far from the first, place great store on predictability, equity of punishment and ‘fairness' and that is the way of most week-to-week tournament golf in Britain and America. Heaven forbid something odd happening at the end of a big event with so much money on the line!

McIlroy is the favourite and not only because of his play in Washington. He was third last year at St Andrews despite not breaking 80 on the Friday, he was in the top few at the USPGA and he led at Augusta with nine holes to play but was done in by a horrible two-hour stretch of play. To think that most predicted it would take him some time to recover from that debacle!

He hasn't played since the US Open but that ought not be a problem for his flashing talent.

Englishman Luke Donald is playing the most consistent golf of anyone this season. Barely has he been out of the top dozen and last week he won the Scottish Open up in Inverness at the new Castle Stuart course. Whilst not technically a links, it is by the water, it is windy and the ball does a lot of bouncing around so it was worthwhile preparation.

Donald has a swing made for a constant repetition of flight and he is brilliant with the wedge and the putter. The other Englishman is Lee Westwood who is a persistent presence in the big championships. He is as solid a player as there is in the game and he can only keep giving himself chances and hope he does not suffer the Colin Montgomerie fate of never quite getting across the line.

There are 11 Australians in the field each hoping to attract as much news print as Bernard Tomic managed a few weeks ago at Wimbledon. Amazingly it seems we are so desperate to find another tennis player that Tomic was seemingly able to attract more attention that the brilliant play so far this year of Jason Day.

The young Queenslander matched Bruce Crampton's 1972 performance of finishing second in both the US Masters and the US Open and he will not be without hope this week. He has had little experience on the British links but nor had Tony Lema when, after 27 holes of practice, he won the 1964 Open at St Andrews.

Our other most likely hopes should be Adam Scott and Geoff Ogilvy but, after fantastic play at Augusta, both missed the cut at Congressional. Ogilvy has been injured has barely played since April and Scott's play has been dormant since Augusta.

Aside from a 5th-placing at St Andrews in 2005, Ogilvy has a poor Open record. Perhaps he hits too high and he has had the bad side of the draw in a couple of recent Opens so he needs a good week to restore his confidence to the level he had it at the end of last year.

Oddly, for the first time in more than 80 years, it would be a real surprise if an American won. Phil Mickelson didn't show much last week in Scotland and he has never really looked like winning an Open. Woods is still absent, their flashiest young player is Rickie Fowler. He is out with McIlroy in the first two rounds but, unlike McIlroy, he has yet to win on the tour.

There are others including Steve Stricker and Nick Watney who have played some terrific golf in America this season but they are far from home on a course that asks for the unusual - so, more than likely, the ‘foreigners' will continue their run of success in the big championships.