Dubai: Rory McIlroy says hitting bad rounds and having to face the world’s media is nothing compared to being interviewed by nine-year-old Billy.

The Northern Irishman was the latest golfer to be interviewed by the youngster as part of the European Tour’s ‘When Billy Met …’ series, which is doing the rounds on social media. The six-minute video has got over 1.5 million views on Facebook since it was uploaded on Friday.

McIlroy squirmed as he was asked questions like who his favourite female tennis player was. And the interview — filmed at Jumeirah Golf Estates ahead of this week’s DP World Tour Championship — ended with Billy gifting McIlroy some socks for his impending marriage to Erica Stoll so he didn’t “get cold feet again”.

Both references were a nod to McIlroy’s former fiance, the Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, with whom he called off an engagement in 2014 before meeting his current fiance, American PGA employee Stoll, in 2015.

“I feel like it was a struggle out there at times this afternoon but nothing like the struggle I felt when Billy was interviewing me,” said McIlroy, after his third round of 68 left him at five-under for the DP World Tour Championship.

“It was much tougher than this,” he said in reference to the press pack gathered around him. “It was great though, even though it was a nine-year-old taking the whatever out of me, it was good fun.

“The European Tour gave me a call the week before and said: ‘How close to the bone can we go?’ and I said: ‘Look, I don’t mind, you can go as close as you want. I wasn’t quite expecting some of the questions that came up, but it was all in good fun.

“I definitely had to put my thinking cap on a couple of times and try and wriggle out of a couple of those questions as best I could,” he added, perhaps in light of the question about his favourite female tennis player, which he dodged by saying he no longer watched ladies’ tennis.

“I had said it’s fine. I’ll take it well and I don’t mind laughing at myself. And it was all going nicely at the start. But when it got onto the other stuff, I was like, Oh! But it was good fun.

“It’s great to do things like that, and it’s nice to be able to show people that I can still laugh at myself.”