When what seems like half of Cork is on the other side of the ropes, many of them professing to be blood cousins, and all of them rooting for you, it must be good to be Padraig Harrington. Yesterday, that was just the way it was. Stargazers, hero worshippers and golf fanatics with dazed looks who have discovered an idol milled around Fota Island as if no one else was on the course.

"There's going to be murder yet," muttered one over-worked marshal, walking down the sixth fairway, as the job of keeping the throngs at bay became much like a frayed elastic band ready to break. Over-stretched stewards, augmented by reinforcements from the host club, ensured that things didn't break down, though; and Harrington, for one, was a little bemused by all the idolatry.

"I don't think I have ever experienced such crowds following me at a tournament in Ireland. Huge! And a very enjoyable experience . . . but it must have been a boring day to watch my golf, hitting the middle of the green all of the time and two putting.

Nothing too exciting," he remarked after a tough day at the office saw him return a 72 for three-under-par 139, seven shots adrift of the leader Colin Montgomerie.

Having played with Tiger Woods in Tulsa two weeks ago in the final round of the US Open and experienced how people flock to him like a magnet, yesterday it was the turn of his playing partners Ian Woosnam and Costantino Rocca to get a closer view than they probably would have wished of how popular Harrington is in this country.

On numerous occasions, the players' caddies had to use their vocal cords to quieten the enthusiastic masses. And even Dave McNeilly's loud pleas couldn't do the trick on the sixth tee where there was plenty of movement behind the advertising hoarding - for some peculiar reason there is a gap between the signage and the ground which allows players to capture any movement out of the corner of their eye - and, consequently, a distracted Harrington's 2-iron tee-shot was hit so fat that it didn't even reach the terrace wall just over 200 yards down the fairway.

Some days the breaks go with you, and sometimes they go against you. From the opening hole, however, Harrington must have known it wouldn't be his day. On the first, a tough 409 yards par four into the teeth of the wind that came from the direction of the wildlife park, his 4-iron approach plugged under the lip of a bunker. An "easy bogey" followed.

For the second day running, he birdied the fourth and fifth holes - an indication of the gale on his back at the fifth being that he only required a wedge approach on a hole that measures 544 yards - but the shenanigans on the sixth confirmed it wouldn't be an easy day.

Someone moved as you were hitting your tee-shot? "Yes," is the monosyllabic reply, and the result of that movement wasn't pretty. However, he seemed to have rescued a par when, after failing to reach the green with his approach, he chipped to two and a half feet. He missed the putt. "Poor concentration," he explained.

The 10th hole, however, proved more exasperating. With his tee-shot finding the right-centre of the fairway, Harrington was left with 190 yards to the front of the green, 206 yards to the flag. His 5-iron second shot cleared everything and pitched into the water. He duffed his recovery shot, and walked away with a bogey.

The huge gallery continued to pull for him, but the magic wasn't working. On the 16th, the wind died for one of the few occasions on a drafty afternoon and his sand wedge approach finished short. He failed to get up and down. Another bogey. And his round was only rescued to some extent by a birdie on the last.

"I can't complain with how I played. On the first tee, I thought how incredible the scoring was - with Monty in on 10-under - and that was probably a bad perception going out in the first place. But the conditions were really tough and, when you go out thinking the best you're going to do is level par, then maybe that was my fault.

" And I was a bit defensive, kept hitting the balls to the middle of the greens. When you do that, you need to hole a few putts, and I didn't." Indeed, the Dubliner confessed that the course, as it played yesterday, was "the longest of any golf course I have played since I came out on tour." Which stubbornly contradicted pre-tournament assertions that this was a course that the tour professionals would take apart.

Harrington, though, in tied-21st position heading into the weekend, knows that the challenge ahead is a tough one. "I don't alter my approach. If I was way out of it, or in the lead, I would be trying just as hard. If I think I can win or if I don't think I can win doesn't change the way that I intend to play.

The issue is that there are 20 players ahead, and Monty being one of them, and the strength of all these guys is such that seven shots is a long way to come back through all those people."

The bookies agree. The on-course bookmakers have drifted Harrington's market price out to 25 to 1 to win the tournament - and, yet, the suspicion is that the support for him will remain as strong as it was yesterday. Cork, it seems, have adopted the Dub.