British Open 2016: Leaderboard, live coverage, results and more from Saturday’s round

We’re going to run it back on Sunday at The Open, which appears to be a two-man duel over the final 36 holes at Royal Troon. Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson will do it all over again at the bottom of the tee sheet in the final round. They’re both at least five shots clear of the next closest competitor in what will be a one-on-one Sunday at The Open.

Stenson managed to flip the margin on Mickelson, who started the third round with a one-shot lead but will begin the final round with a one-shot deficit. The two exchanged blows all round, flipping back and forth at the top of the leaderboard before Stenson used the two back nine par-3s to get ahead. Both par-3s featured two-shot swings, with the Swede pouring in two birdies and Phil dropping two shots with bogeys. The second swing came at the 17th and that’s where it would stand going into Sunday.

Call it what it is. With 18 holes left at Royal Troon, the 145th Open Championship is a two-man tournament. And it’s between two of the sport’s biggest names.

Henrik Stenson will sleep on his first ever 54-hole lead in a major championship Saturday night with a one-shot advantage over five-time major champion and 36-hole leader Phil Mickelson. The two were paired together for the entirety of the third round and traded blows and mistakes, jockeying for position at the top whilst possible challengers faltered around them. By day’s end, second-place Mickleson (-11) was five shots clear of third-place Bill Haas at six-under, six clear of fourth-place Beef Johnston and seven clear of fifth-place Steve Stricker.

Phil Mickelson was facing a tough fairway shot on the 18th hole at The Open, grinding to get back even with Henrik Stenson atop the leaderboard. With the ball below his feet, Mickelson made a swing and missed his mark to the left, putting the ball in a tough greenside pot bunker. Initially, it just looked like a bad shot but then the NBC microphones picked up Mickelson’s furor with some photographers behind him.

First, Phil audibly blurted out, “That is so sh*tty to do that!” before following up with, “I get that you have to cover it, but don’t interfere with!”

A few names like Beef Johnston, Sergio Garcia and Dustin Johnson have made their runs Saturday on the first page of the leaderboard, but The Open remains a two-man race in the third round. There’s Phil Mickelson, desperately holding onto a one-shot lead at 11-under, and then there’s Henrik Stenson, the hottest player in the field since Friday, staying right on his heels.

The conditions can change in a hurry, and there are big numbers lurking out there on every hole, especially on the back nine. Still, it seems like your 2016 champion golfer of the year is going to come from that final pairing. It looked like the big-hitting Swede would take the driver’s seat early in the round, opening with birdie on the first green to pull even with Phil right away.

Rory McIlroy is a savant of the well-executed furious club toss, and he added one of his best to the library on Saturday at The Open.

It’s been a frustrating week for McIlroy, who’s hit the ball well enough tee-to-green but putted horribly and caught the wrong side of the weather draw at Royal Troon. The wind and rains of Friday afternoon largely eliminated his shot at a second Open Championship, and it hasn’t been pretty on Saturday, either. That bubbled over with this 3-wood from the fairway, which, well, will no longer be in use for the third round.

Jordan Spieth, after scoring over par in a 10th consecutive major round, blamed his recent struggles on his ball-striking and some bad luck of the draw at Royal Troon. Then he made a plea to convince reporters that, despite their “negative” questions, it’s not all that bad.

“Most of the questions I get are comparing last year and therefore negative because it’s not to the same standard,” Spieth told reporters after posting a 1-over 72 in Saturday’s third round of the Open Championship. “So that’s almost tough to then convince myself that you’re having a good year, when nobody else really -- even if you guys think it is, the questions I get make me feel like it’s not.”

One constant at The Open is the total unpredictability once a player hits the ball off the fairway. You might catch a perfectly clean lie, you might fall into an unplayable lie, and you might get a lie where you have no idea what’s going to happen until you make the swing.

World No. 1 Jason Day found this out the hard way on Saturday morning as he was working on an excellent round. Day tried to chop out of some high junk off the fairway, and the ball, caught perfectly in slo-mo by the NBC replay, went right off the hosel. It shot almost directly across the fairway and toward some sort of hospitality structure, sending people for cover.

Phil Mickelson is 36 holes from winning his first major in three years, when he won The Open at Muirfield on the east coast of Scotland. The same tournament is in the same country this year, at Royal Troon, and Mickelson has pieced together 36 brilliant holes so far. Now the 46-year-old just needs 36 more to quell any concern that he’d outgrown the chance to win a sixth major.

Mickelson was at his best on Thursday, when he set a course record by shooting a remarkable 63. (It would’ve been a major championship record 62, if not for golf being a fickle and unforgiving sport.) He exited the first round with a three-shot lead against runners-up Martin Kaymer and Patrick Reed.

Bubba Watson is one of the most creative shotmakers in the history of the game. Now he’s creatively found a way to blast a ball completely off the property at Royal Troon on the same hole two days in a row.

One day after Bubba sent a drive rocketing off the course and over the railway that lines the 11th hole, the big-hitting lefty did it again. Only this time, he went out of bounds with an approach shot. A driver that goes wild and OB is definitely understandable and something we’ve seen on several occasions in that spot this week at The Open. But completely yanking an iron so far off line that it not only misses the green, but misses the entire course, and goes onto the other side of the train tracks? That’s an incredible miss.

If Phil Mickelson can wear a paper clip on his cap without having Twitter tear him a new one, then Billy Horschel can damn well turn his backwards to finish out a miserable round at Royal Troon.

Horschel, who drew the drowned-rat afternoon wave of Friday’s Open tee times, was finishing up a hellish 14-over 85 second round. The colorful BillyHo, known primarily before his 2014 FedExCup-winning season for his octopus pants and other gaudy attire, unwittingly caused quite the stir when he had the unmitigated chutzpah to turn his golf hat around as he waded into the finishing hole.

Bubba Watson seems to have a frosty relationship with links courses and The Open — he just hasn’t figured out how to play this style — but any grumpiness about the conditions on Saturday should be mitigated by this absurdly lucky bounce he caught off a sprinkler head early in the third round.

After two marathon days at Royal Troon, the Open Championship field has been cut down for the weekend. The R&A has a relatively inclusive cut rule, letting the top 70 and ties through to the weekend (the U.S. Open, by contrast, cuts all but the top 60 and ties). This year, that means 81 players will get to tee it up for 36 more holes, which is about as large as a field will get on the weekend at any tournament. There’s also no secondary cut to get it down for Sunday, as would happen on the PGA Tour.

The R&A will start them at 3:25 a.m. on Saturday back in the States, which is almost two hours later than the past two days with the full 156-man field. The Golf Channel coverage will start at 4 a.m. ET, five minutes after the golden child, Jordan Spieth, tees off alongside Brandt Snedeker. Spieth sounded resigned on Friday afternoon when he came in from a round played in the worst of the weather conditions so far this week. Spieth made the weekend right on the number, so he’s a good 14 shots back with 36 to play. He left the door slightly open that he could get into it, but sounded realistic that the championship is gone. Nevertheless, he’ll be an early featured player on the broadcast with Snedeker.

The primary reason why The Open is the best major in golf is its uniqueness, how it stands apart so much from the other three American-based majors. So much of what separates it is charming and positive, but some argue its biggest negative is what we saw on Friday at Royal Troon.

It’s not really an Open until the wind starts whipping across the links and the rain starts hitting you sideways. We got that on Friday, and as we’ve seen at so many Opens in the past, it did not affect the entire field in the same equitable way. Different sides of the draw can often get a benefit at the other majors, but never as consistently and dramatically as at The Open.