Padraig Harrington believes he will be turned on mentally when he faces Geoff Ogilvy in the first round of the WGC Accenture Match Play tomorrow.

The Dubliner realised that he was thinking too much about his swing when he crashed out of contention over the weekend in the Northern Trust Open.

Despite finishing 55th in Los Angeles, Harrington said: “I was thinking about it on Saturday night and trying to figure out what went wrong and why I was so hard on myself.

“I realised that I was still too much into the technical side of my game and not enough into the mental aspects.

“It was like a light bulb going off in my head.”

Harrington complained after a poor week in the AT&T Pro-Am at Pebble Beach that he was being too hard on himself for his bad shots.

He thought he had solved his problems after a long session with mental coach Dr Bob Rotella when he surged into the mix at halfway in LA.

But his bad habits came back to bite him and he blew his chances of a first US Tour win for two and a half years with a third round 75.

He said: “Going into the weekend I was feeling confident that I was on the right road and looking forward to playing.

“But on Saturday I had a bad day, just didn’t play well and I reverted to getting down on myself, thinking about my swing and other technical things.”

After realising where he was going wrong, Harrington walked away from Riviera feeling more positive about his game heading to Tucson.

The world No 35 said: “I was disappointed that there was no more holes left when I was coming up the eighteenth hole on Sunday.

“It was a much less stressful round once I forgot about the technical and worried only about the mental side.”