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Hot days and hard greens at the Masters. It was up in the mid-80s by lunchtime on Friday, and that was if you were underneath the trees with a Georgia peach ice cream sandwich. Out there on the other side of the ropes it looked a whole lot hotter again. The world’s best golfers sweated away chasing after Rory McIlroy’s lead in conditions which, they all agreed, could yet get as tough as they come at Augusta National. By midway through the afternoon McIlroy loomed over the tournament like the Augusta sun, and you worried players who made the mistake of looking right at the big white leaderboards might burn their eyes grounds on the numbers he was running up.

A way up ahead along the course, Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth were all each doing their best to just stay focused on their own game. There was a time, and not so long ago, when both Spieth and Koepka had a claim to be even better than the man they were now trailing, and Rose, of course, played one of the very best rounds of his life to finish runner-up to McIlroy here last year. They won nine majors between the three of them, but with McIlroy in this sort of form, it was hard work just to stay in within a short iron’s distance of him over the weekend.

After an hour they were all three were bunched together on one-under par, four shots off McIlroy’s overnight lead. Spieth had made up a shot with an improbable birdie at the 1st after lumping his opening drive into the fairway bunker, Rose had dropped one at the same hole after he three-putted from the fringe, and so had Koepka, who then made two strokes back again with birdies at the 2nd and 3rd. That meant all three of them were in the sort of position where they were thinking about making a run.

By the end of the day Rose was five-under, tied for fourth place. Koepka was two shots behind him, in 13th. He put a lot of his improvement down to the fact that he’d accidentally had the wrong settings on his driver during the opening day’s play. Then there was Spieth, and, well, you needed to scroll a way down the pages to find him. He finished one-over par, back among the also-here-this-years.

While Spieth zig-zagged around the course, Rose just kept plugging away along the fairways. After dropping that shot at the 1st, he covered the next five holes in even par, as if, regretting that early mistake, he was determined not to even attempt anything that might cause him to make another one until he had steadied himself again. If you needed an idea of just how tough it was out there Rose, usually as imperturbable as a butler, ended up tossing his club after he missed his birdie putt on the 4th.

Rose knows that it pays to be patient, and he regathered himself. His first birdie of the day finally came at the 7th, and after that they rushed in a flurry as he made the turn. He was kicked into it by a long back-and-forth with his caddie about exactly what sort of shot he should play at the 9th. “I really wanted to hit nine iron in there, and the wind wasn’t fitting that club, and I just didn’t really want to hit eight iron in there because I felt like it was going to skip through the green,” he explained. “So I was really trying to bide my time and wait for that little moment where I could commit to the nine-iron. It was a great moment where I was able to get it quite close to the hole and make birdie.”

Rose followed it with a pair of spectacular approach shots at the 10th and 11th, both of them to within a few feet of the pin. There was a bogey at the 12th, but he made it back at the 15th.

Given that Rose has finished as the runner-up here in three different years, and lost two playoffs doing it, there are a lot of people out here pulling for him. There have been so many sentimental bets, at comparatively long odds, that the only people who don’t want to see him to get it done are the bookmakers. He tries not to think about it. “Of course I want to win this tournament. I don’t really need to try any harder; know what I mean? I think trying harder ain’t going to help me. So that’s probably the dance I’m doing with myself. I know the intrinsic motivation is there. It’s about execution.”

It’s not going to get any easier over the weekend. Last year decided he needed to try and birdie every hole if he was going to catch McIlroy on Sunday, and he damn near did exactly that on the second nine, which he covered in 32. “I was just trying to run to the clubhouse as fast and hard as I could,” Rose said, “That’s the luxury of playing from behind sometimes, and maybe there’s a lesson in there of that’s the best way to play sometimes, too.” Chances are he’ll need to be even better again if he’s going to catch him this year.