It’s that time of the golfing year when all and sundry have a go at predicting the unpredictable. And they tend to get it spectacularly wrong. Experts, analysts, pundits, commentators, bookmakers, past players, current players, swing gurus, soothsayers, religious zealots … even the golf writers have a go at it.

Everybody is asking the question but nobody can answer it. Who is going to win the Open Championship here at Royal Birkdale? Golf, as well know, is never an exact science and the vagaries, nuances and fluctuating fortunes of this unfathomable, mind-mangling pursuit tends to leave most folk scratching their heads like Stan Laurel pondering which wire to cut on a ticking time bomb.

The 146th staging of golf’s most venerated championship is, mercifully, set to explode into life today after days and days and days of unrelenting build-up, previews, ponderings and posturings. In this age of relative parity, attempting to forsee the winner of the majors is rather like an elaborate game of the pin the tail on the donkey. There are so many runners and riders involved in this golfing stab in the dark. The obvious, well-documented, high-profile thoroughbreds get saddled with the usual burdens of fevered expectation but a 156-man field also features more dark horses than Zorro’s stables. Everybody seems to be searching for little nuggets, indicators and pointers.

If you like to dabble in nonchalant, outside flutters, for instance, then the largely unheralded name of Ryan Fox has tickled one or two fancies. The New Zealander has played in only one Open before but, having enjoyed timely tonics in the links arena with fourth place finishes in both the Irish and the Scottish Opens recently, he has bounded into Birkdale with a considerable spring in his step. Of course, having picked him out as a potential one to watch, this means Fox will shoot an 81 today. It was ever thus.

Rory McIlroy, meanwhile, raised an eye-brow when he was informed yesterday that one bookmaker had him as 20/1 to recapture the Claret Jug he won down the coast at Hoylake in 2014. “Good time to back me, I think,” he said with a chortle.

It’s 10 years now since McIlroy made his debut in the Open, when he won the silver medal as the leading amateur in the 2007 championship at Carnoustie. He’s done pretty well for himself over the last decade and, while he has endured a topsy-turvy, injury-hindered campaign in 2017, the 28-year-old remains bullish. “I want to win this week,” declared McIlroy, who has added a 1-iron into his armoury ahead of an examination that will put a premium on precision instead of sheer power. “I don't need to win. A second Open Championship isn't going to change my life. But I want to win. I'm still as ambitious now as I was starting off my career.”

When McIlroy won the Open three years ago, it sparked a rampaging resurgence as he went on to win a WGC title and the PGA Championship within the space of a few weeks. "When I won those three tournaments in 2014, I was going into the Masters the next year thinking I can win the (career) grand slam,” he reflected. “It was ‘I can do this, I can do that’, but some things just come along that you don't expect and those injuries in the past couple of years have stopped me in my tracks. I wish I was here being the No 1 player in the world and having won a couple more majors but I haven't. But I'm working on it. I'm trying to get back there and I'm doing everything I can. I was on a crest of a wave in 2014 and hopefully the start of that wave happens this week again."

Birkdale is in fantastic condition. Baked by the sun over the last couple of days, although hit by a storm last night, it’s certainly not the yellow brick road it was in that sizzling summer of 1976 but there will still be a golfing wizard at the end of it come Sunday. With strong, gusting winds and rain in the forecast for the championship days, the test will be considerable and full of menace.

The daunting, majestic duneland of Birkdale was once described by Julius Boros, the triple major winner from days of yore, as “moon country, man.” There’s nothing alien about it, though. There are no gimmicks, no funky greens, just superb definition to a course which, in the rigorous, cut-and-thrust of championship golf, requires imagination, invention and sturdy mental resolve. Birkdale invariably identifies great champions. The names of figures like Peter Thomson, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Padraig Harrington and Mark O’Meara on its roll of honour validates the robust and fair nature of the challenge.

Whatever the numbers on the course, the R&A high heid yins are expecting big ones through the gates. “In excess of 220,000,” predicted the governing body’s chief executive, Martin Slumbers. The record attendance for an Open remains the 239,000 who shoehorned themselves into St Andrews for the millennium Open. “There is a fighting chance that we might even get to close to that figure,” added Slumbers.

However large the sea of golfing humanity, the to-ings and fro-ings on the links should keep them thoroughly entertained.