Lee Westwood has urged Robert MacIntyre to learn the value of patience to improve his current “one-dimensional” game.

Westwood has played alongside MacIntyre on several occasions, including during the Players Championship in March and most recently in the first two rounds of last week’s Scottish Open.

Although he has been impressed with what he has seen at first hand, the former world number one believes the left-hander will have to temper his aggressive approach to progress further up the rankings.

“He’s a good player. He’s got a good future,” Westwood said of the world number 53, who is the only Scottish player in the field for the 149th Open Championship at Royal St George’s.

“If I’m being completely honest his game is still a little one dimensional, but he’ll learn that as he goes along. He’ll learn the knockdown shots you need.

“When I look at him I see a good short game and a good putter, which is obviously what you need, but I see he’s a little bit too flat out all the time at the moment, which is what kids do.”

Told that MacIntyre, who was sixth on his Open debut in 2019 and has made the cut in all six of his major starts to date, had acknowledged the issue, Westwood added: “Well there you go, he knows it.

“I was exactly the same. I grew up watching Greg Norman and loved his aggressive nature. I always wanted to be like that and found out the hard way that you can’t play like that all the time.

“I think he’s got a good lad on the bag (Mike Thomson) as well that will help. It’s important to have a good caddie to pull the reins on him now and then. When I listen to them on the golf course they sound like a sensible pair when there’s chat going backwards and forwards.”

Westwood also believes MacIntyre would benefit from having more Scottish players competing at the highest levels of the game, with Martin Laird (110th) the next highest-ranked player.

“In a week like this that means the focus is all on him,” Westwood said. “It’s much easier when there’s a group of you. We’ve had a lot of English players and you can filter (the attention) out between all of you.

“At the turn of the century I was the only one in the top 100 of the world rankings, so pretty much everything was about me when an Open came around. Now we’ve got 10 possible winners when we turn up to the big championships. It dissipates the focus a little bit.”