James Lawton: McIlroy could turn up in his pyjamas and still triumph

Rory McIlroy watches his approach shot to the fifth green (Reuters)

For Rory McIlroy there will be safer, more serene days when all the world will see is the easiness of his talent and a boyish refusal to take life too seriously.

But then there will never be a time when he proves more dramatically that he is a golfer beyond all normal considerations. Yesterday, when his watch almost wiped out his place in this great tournament by displaying a different time zone, he not only survived, he made a huge contribution to Europe's astonishing challenge that might just rise up from the dead.

After beating Keegan Bradley, right, who had become the scourge of Europe, McIlroy declared: "I was lucky there was a State Trooper outside when I realised I was on the wrong time. He gave me a ride and maybe I was lucky that I didn't have too much time to think about what was in front of me."

But then would it have mattered so much? Would he not once again have played simply on his own instincts – and would that not have been enough?

When the world's No 1-ranked player arrived with his police escort so perilously close to tee time, and came out of his car looking rumpled enough to have spent the night on a bench at the local Greyhound bus station, his pivotal match against the new American golf beast suddenly resembled more a morality tale.

However, for quite a while the moral of the story seemed to be that if you have as much talent as McIlroy, you can probably show up pretty much when you like and maybe even wearing your pyjamas.

However, as he raced to a frequently brilliant outward nine of 32 – and went two up over the player who had not only been the relentless hammer of the European team but also the man who had helped provoke Phil Mickelson into some of his best form of his Ryder Cup career – there was also a sense that he had never carried so much pressure to deliver some of his most luminous talent. As Bradley received a rapturous reception at the first tee, McIlroy heard derisive cries of "Wakey, Wakey, Rory". At the same time his team captain of two years ago, Colin Montgomerie, was raging about how unbelievable it was that both the player, the world's best as it happened, and team officials had come so close to arguably the biggest self-inflicted catastrophe in 85 years of this historic competition.

But if Bradley was the new hero of American golf, if he was sent out by his team captain to heighten emotion on the first tee some 20 minutes before his own official appearance there – and while his opponent was still being sped to the course – there was something, it was clear soon enough, that he could not quite control.

In the case of McIlroy it was an extraordinary re-affirmation of that knack of defiance which he displayed in the few months between a catastrophe at the US Masters and an extraordinary triumph at the US Open. He won this year's PGA title by a mile and yesterday he was again the most resilient of modern golfers.

Briefly he was pinned back on the 12th and 13th holes, when Bradley brought the battle to all-square, and there seemed the desperate possibility that the man from Vermont would again assert his ability to take down any European opponent, no matter how distinguished his reputation and his natural ability.

Sergio Garcia, Luke Donald, Lee Westwood and McIlroy himself had been among Bradley's victims but yesterday there was no question that McIlroy would yield significantly. His time-keeping might have been awry.

His performance was less than you would expect from some buttoned down young professional in charge of the golfing universe. But he was quite untouchable in both his skill and his resilience and when he delivered victory by 2 & 1 on the 17th green, he could not have not done more to underline his new status.

He was the player on whom you could place all the pressure in the world – and for what? It was the extraordinary sight of his finding a way to win, anywhere, anytime. Whether it was enough to produce one of the most extraordinary comebacks in the history of the Ryder Cup was far from sure as we moved towards the final passage of a magnificent tournament.

What no one doubted, though, was that Rory McIlroy was indeed a young champion who could make his own rules – and create his own zone of both time and brilliance.