Ben Coley's analysis of the first round of the Open Championship

The spice of life

It didn't take long to form a picture of this Open Championship and what will be four glorious days in the English sunshine.

Birkdale will be no pushover. We'd seen in Monday's Last-Chance Qualifier that anything under-par rates a good round and the scoring average come the end of the day was just a fraction more than one-over par.

But here's the thing about the Open: the scoring average doesn't really matter. What matters is that we see a wider variety of shots, greater demands on both the brain and the body, than in any other tournament. Thursday's first round demonstrated that perfectly.

The very first group, at 6.30am, began with Matthew Baldwin nudging a long-iron down the right-hand side of the fairway, desperately avoiding the bunker to the left. After him, Thomas Detry blasted driver as far as the spectator walkway, hit his wedge in close, and made the first birdie of the championship.

At the fifth hole, attempting to drive the green looked the play on the face of it, yet just after Justin Thomas elected instead to lay up and fired a wedge in close for his birdie, Bryson DeChambeau powered his ball through the back of the green and walked off with par.

The 10th hole provided three options, each of them with pay-offs: lay up with an iron and leave a long second to a front pin, take something more and risk missing the fairway, or attempt to drive the green. DeChambeau did that and made the simplest of birdies. The more evidence that was gathered through the day, the more it became clear that in this instance, driver for those long enough was the correct call.

Options were perhaps not as plentiful during the back-nine, but DeChambeau was far from alone in hitting driver at the par-five 17th, where Alex Smalley had scooted an iron some 305 yards down the fairway. With DeChambeau's ball in the rough, Smalley's approach slot was from almost exactly the same distance.

And while DeChambeau was doing much of this, including thrashing driver up the 18th where Smalley had gone out of bounds with an iron, Robert MacIntyre began his remarks to Sky Sports with "very defensive", a reference to how he had decided to go about compiling the same score as DeChambeau.

Decisions, variety of club selection and shot shape... this was prime Open viewing and while there's an element of thinking that the reason it's so beloved is that it's so rare, personally I can't get enough of it.

Different strokes

As the early starters completed their rounds, it would've been easy to conclude that anyone electing not to play in last week's Scottish Open had made an enormous error of judgement. It didn't matter how you played up at The Renaissance, only that you had played.

Sungjae Im and Daniel Brown posted 66s; both had missed the cut last week. Smalley threatened to beat them both until making a mess of the last; he too had missed the cut in Scotland. Any links golf is better than none, or so it appeared from the early exchanges.

At the opposite end of the leaderboard, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Justin Rose had made that error of judgement. Rose finished 11th in the US Open then 25th the following week, but skipped the Scottish Open. At least some of the blame for his five-over 75 could surely be apportioned to an inexplicable error in scheduling, although it later transpired that he was battling a neck injury.

Rose wasn't alone. Hideki Matsuyama skipped the Scottish Open again and once again failed to fire in a tournament which should suit him. Gary Woodland ought to love The Renaissance but elected not to go and he was stone last at 3pm. Cameron Smith and Joaquin Niemann may have required invitations but whatever the reasons for their absence, it also showed in the early stages of their respective rounds.

But wait a minute. Bryson DeChambeau hadn't played since missing the cut in the US Open and was the pick of the big names from the first half of the draw. Then, in the afternoon, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Young appeared the most menacing, both having been absent since the Travelers Championship, which is about as far away from this kind of golf as you will ever get. Jacob Bridgeman was close behind and he'd last been seen in the John Deere Classic.

Meanwhile, Rory McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick, both having seemingly prepared perfectly in Scotland, were on the back foot early. McIlroy had challenged Scottie Scheffler for favouritism and Fitzpatrick had never been a shorter price for a major championship. By the end of the day, history suggested they were all but out of it, trailing by seven. Although the last time someone covered that gap over the final three rounds does happen to have been here in 1998.

Professional golfers, the experienced ones at least, know what they're doing. We should trust them to get their preparation right, whatever form it takes.

Ominous, but in which way?

Speaking of Scheffler, his performance can be taken in one of two ways. Either this was the sort of platform from which the world's best player launches his bid for a second Open and fifth major championship win, or else it was further evidence that today's version simply isn't as good as last year's and will come unstuck.

I tend towards the latter. Scheffler's post-round interview on Sky Sports would've encouraged backers, but from four-under through six he didn't make another birdie, dropping two shots to let a brilliant start rather slip through his fingers. Again we saw some issues with his short irons, a theme of the season, while his approach to the par-five 17th saw him do what he's not meant to do and miss in precisely the wrong place.

There were positives, particularly in the way he drove the ball, but Friday afternoon will likely see Scheffler tested by a firmer Birkdale, with a stiffer breeze compounding that. At his best, you'd expect Scheffler to rise to the challenge. Where he is right now, I wonder whether we might see him fall behind before a customary Saturday charge like the one we saw in the US Open.

As for some of the other big names, DeChambeau no doubt is playing with a little more fire having faced (largely appropriate) criticism for the way he's performed, or rather failed to, in majors this year. It's more than 30 years since a player with his CV missed the first three cuts of the major season, by the way. That's why we talk about it: golfers with multiple major wins are usually at least able to make a weekend or two.

Of course, that shouldn't be a problem now and I'm not sure I agree with the view articulated in some places that his aggressive approach to Birkdale will catch him out eventually. Hand on heart I did tend that way before the tournament began, hence selecting him only for the first-round lead rather than at huge outright odds, but seeing how Birkdale played I wonder if aggression, rather than pragmatism, might win this time.

Key holes

Moving forward into round two and beyond, already we have a view of the holes that will be most interesting to watch and perhaps help shape the 154th Open Championship.

The fifth, a new, driveable par-four, could provide greater variance when a back pin position is put in play, though that would surely encourage more players to go for the green. The tough sixth represents the biggest test on the front-nine, but the first, once considered the toughest opening hole in the Open rota, produced more double-bogeys.

On the back-nine, holes 10, 11, 14 and 17 provide the main birdie opportunities and the latter has to be taken advantage of. Scheffler's bogey there was especially costly. It's worth noting though that in terms of volatility, the 17th was the only hole on the course which allowed for eagles and even then just a couple.

The congested nature of the early leaderboard raises hopes that we've a proper battle for the Claret Jug heading into the back-nine on Sunday, which hasn't really been the case since 2022. If that comes to pass, the rhythm of Birkdale means that it'll be less about clinging onto a score and more about producing the sort of back-nine burst we see at Augusta in the spring.

Part of the charm

Finally, a word on Jackson Suber, who ends the day as leader of the Open Championship on his debut in the event.

Suber was an unspectacular amateur who made an unspectacular transition to the professional game. He spent two years on the Korn Ferry Tour without winning a title, then just about kept his head above water as a PGA Tour rookie, never looking more than perhaps a future contender for a Valspar Championship close to his childhood home. Maybe an RSM Classic, a Wyndham.

But part of the beauty of this sport is that players progress at different rates, and part of the beauty of the Open is that it all but guarantees one such player will appear in the mix at some stage, often after the first round. He joins names like Christo Lamprecht, Jacob Skov Olesen and Dan Brown on the list of recent early pace-setters.

Suber certainly has been progressing, too. He held himself together well when contending for the Canadian Open right after qualifying for the US Open, was not disgraced up in grade in the Travelers Championship, then added a third top-10 finish in six starts at the John Deere last time out.

Did anyone expect him to feature here? No. But in the Open, anything goes. A scrap, a quality shot or two, a fabulous bounce at the 17th and suddenly the Open had a virtual unknown atop its yellow leaderboards as the sun set on another absorbing day.

Now read Matt Cooper's Open Diary