Matt Fitzpatrick is out of The Open Championship after two rounds at Royal Birkdale, a sudden end for one of the players who had been in the frame for PGA TOUR Player of the Year. He shot 72 on Thursday and 72 again on Friday, leaving him 4 over and outside the projected cutline.
That cutline was projected at 1 over as of 4 p.m. local time, with players still finishing in the late afternoon. By then, the math was already hard on Fitzpatrick, whose return to the weekend never really materialized once the second round settled in.
For readers following Jon Rahm’s side of the British Open picture, the draw here was the cut race itself: a major championship leaderboard can change fast, but the weekend field is decided by a simple line, and Fitzpatrick missed it. He had top-25 finishes in the first three majors of the season, and this was his first missed cut at a major since the 2024 PGA Championship, and his first at The Open since 2018.
The frustration was not just the score, but how familiar the complaint sounded. Fitzpatrick said he needed to focus on just three or four holes, adding that he had hit decent shots, gotten no luck and still come away at 4 over. He called it links golf and said you need a little rub of the green, which he did not get this week. That is the kind of explanation that sounds thin only because the numbers are so blunt.
Wyndham Clark was pushed out with him after rounds of 73 and 70 left him 3 over. He made double bogeys on the second and third holes, and that damage proved too much even before the cutline settled. Aaron Rai also missed the weekend at 1 over, Tom Kim was gone after a 73 on Friday, and Eric Cole stayed alive at even par after turning a 76 on Thursday into a 64 in the second round. Cole said he and his wife had already been looking at different flights home last night, a small sentence that captured how narrow the margin had become.
Rory McIlroy’s 67 moved him to 1 under, Sam Burns surged with an 8-under 62 to 5 under, and the weekend field kept sorting itself out around them. The open question now is not whether Fitzpatrick can contend in the final two rounds — he cannot — but how much this missed cut reshapes a season that had looked built for a bigger closing stretch.
