Shane Lowry targets Monster finish in his bid to secure US PGA card

Shane Lowry will head into the final round of the WGC-Cadillac Championship on the Blue Monster course Sunday with a chance to make significant inroads into his quest to secure a full US PGA Tour card via the non-member earnings category.

The Offalyman shot a third round 70 to sit on 215, one under par, alongside Rory McIlroy at the 54-hole stage of the megabucks €8 million championship at Trump National Doral. Lowry – who already has a tied-seventh in the Farmers Insurance Open and a top-25 in the AT&T Pebble Beach pro-am on his only two appearances of the season – is aiming to secure his full playing rights stateside.

More immediately, though, he has his sights set on challenging for the title here – even if he has a lot of ground to make up on frontrunner JB Holmes, who was one of two players, along with Dustin Johnson, to record a hole-in-one on the fourth. Four straight birdies from the 14th got Holmes to 12 under, but even after carding a bogey at 18, he still leads by five from Johnson and Bubba Watson.

“I don’t know if I have a chance to win, but you never know. I am happy with how I am playing. I feel like I am going to hole every putt I look at. I feel like I am going to hit my driver in the middle of every fairway. My iron play felt good. I love the challenge of tough golf courses,” said Lowry, who made a blistering start to his third round with four birdies inside his opening six holes.

Although he suffered back-to-back bogeys on the homeward run when three-putting the 13th and failing to get up and down from a greenside bunker on the 14th, Lowry rallied with a birdie on the 16th – rolling in a 10 footer – only to bogey the 18th, the toughest hole on the course, after missing the fairway right, clipping a TV camera and ricocheting behind a tree.

McIlroy, who played with 13 clubs after deciding not to replace the 3-iron which was tossed into the lake in a fit of pique Friday, shot a third-round 72 but finished the round still searching for consistency. The Ulsterman had four birdies and four bogeys in his round and claimed he needed “something in the 60s” in Sunday’s final round to make inroads.

A scuba diver went searching for – and found – McIlroy’s 3-iron in the lake by the eighth hole as the player completed his third round and, although there seemed to be some momentum after two birdies in his opening seven holes on Saturday, it was stopped abruptly by back-to-back bogeys on eight and nine.

The chief cause of McIlroy's problems through the first three rounds has been his iron play, but, with the Masters edging ever closer, the world number one has discounted adding any additional events onto his schedule. After finishing up here, McIlroy heads to Augusta for two days prep work – playing with American footballer Tom Brady – and then plays in the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, which will be his last competitive outing prior to seeking a third straight Major to go with the British Open and US PGA titles won last year and his bid to complete the career Grand Slam.