CADDIE'S ROLE:Ten years ago the club was merely a big square of grass surrounded by sand. A decade ago Rory McIlroy was a snotty-nosed kid playing with his mates on street corners in Holywood. Last week he ran with the big boys and came to the front after a nervous finish in the concrete-clad desert.

McIlroy came to the Middle East three years ago on an invitation to play the Dubai Desert Classic. He narrowly missed the cut but followed Tiger Woods on the weekend, scurrying around inside the ropes with the photographers trying to capture his own images of how the best player in the world plies his trade.

He learnt well. Because, despite playing world-class golf and reaching 22 under par after 68 holes, the reality of leading a golf tournament gripped him. It was time to abandon the birdie golf and knuckle down to getting the job done and win his first European Tour title.

This is what the master Woods and other multiple winners are so good at and it is, of course, the art of four-round professional golf, winning without necessarily hitting the quality of shots.

McIlroy had obviously learned well from the grandmaster because Woods did not play great golf in the final round in 2006. He hustled the ball around the Emirates course and somehow got it in the hole.

McIlroy made a veteran’s par on the par-five 18th last Sunday with water and disaster looming for two of the shots he played under the most pressure he must have felt in his short life to date. His up and down from the back trap to a pin cut on the end of a severe downslope with water just five paces beyond was a sand-save that only a player with guts could pull off.

This was not just a matter of skill, this was the test of a very young and extremely talented golfer who needed to show his mettle. Anyone who may have doubted his resolve under pressure in the two previous occasions in his embryonic career, when he stared down the barrel of victory, have surely now quelled their scepticism.

A six-shot lead at one stage of the final round can lead to complacency. It is an isolated place in which you might think a golfer would love to find himself.

It’s not always the case, mainly because it is difficult to keep up the pressure of aggressive golf. When you have such a lead there is a tendency to try to steer your lead back to the winner’s podium. Of course the very thought of winning is a fatal distraction.

McIlroy is head of a new era of golfers who all seem to be cut out of the same quality cloth.

Ross Fisher, Martin Kaymer, Oliver Fisher and Alex Noren are all young, talented and extremely well-mannered relative newcomers to the European Tour who have been very well groomed in etiquette, behaviour and respect for those around them.

I certainly notice a refreshing attitude from these superstars who could quite easily have assumed a right of passage and entitlement which some of their predecessors have been guilty of in the past.

I was the victim of an untimely collision with a cement truck while travelling in a taxi in Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago and was visibly carrying a neck injury. I don’t know Rory that well but his genuine concern for me was heart-warming. Any day I have seen him since he has enquired about my progress. I was touched by the concern of an acquaintance who took the time to worry about a relative stranger’s welfare.

It is probably over 30 years since Europe has had such a prodigy in its domain. Seve Ballesteros was the youngest to win in Europe and, of course, went on to be the most dominant and entertaining player to walk European fairways for decades. His flair and bravado matched his fiery Iberian temperament.

Rory McIlroy is the modern Seve. He is a toned-down version with the quiet confidence of a winner instead of the arrogant, bulldozing manner of the previous era.

He has a fine head of hair which should be his trademark; there are enough clones in the game. Just as I hope he keeps his unique look I hope everyone’s expectations of the boy wonder do not change his self-effacing manner.

Just as Seve was the talisman for European golf throughout the 1980s let’s hope that Rory keeps entertaining us on European soil over the next two decades as well as taking his enormous and exciting talent to America.