Augusta countdown: It's tough when I don't play like a major winner, says Danny Willett

Willett became the first English winner of the Masters for 20 years with his dramatic victory at Augusta National 12 months ago, taking advantage of defending champion Jordan Spieth’s collapse with a flawless final round of 67.

The 29-year-old Yorkshireman also finished third in the BMW PGA Championship and second in the Italian Open, but was struggling for form by the time of his Ryder Cup debut and failed to win a single point, albeit not helped by his brother’s controversial article about American fans.

So far in 2017 he has failed to convert a three-shot 54-hole lead in Malaysia, finished 69th in the 77-man field in the WGC-Mexico Championship and failed to reach the knockout stages of the WGC-Match Play in Austin.

Such struggles inevitably have not gone unnoticed on social media, where a handful of Willett’s 114,000 followers have not been afraid to lambast the world No 17.

“You’ve got to realise it’s a very, very small percentage unfortunately of people that aren’t very positive about things,” said Willett.

“That’s the world we live in with how social media has gone. It’s a good tool for a lot of things, but it’s also a good tool for people who are sat at home with nothing better to do.

“You’ve got to take it all with a pinch of salt – sometimes it’s definitely better to just turn your phone off and put it away so you don’t read it, but sometimes if something is said that is out of order, I think you should say something back.

“I don’t think it’s fair that people can sit there and say them kind of things; they wouldn’t do it if they were stood next to you in the pub or anything like that.

“Unfortunately people think because it’s just on their phone that there’s nobody actually at the other end of it.”

Willett concedes he may have fallen into the trap of placing more pressure on himself as a major champion, but insists the work he is doing on his swing was not a reaction to the win.

“I was trying not to have higher expectations, but I think that’s kind of crept in a little bit,” he added.

“There is pressure you put on yourself and the pressure others do, and expectations that because you’ve done it once you should be able to do it every week, and then you obviously start to think a little like that.

“The best part is having the jacket, being Masters champion. The worst part is when you pitch up and don’t quite play like you are a major champion – that’s the hardest thing to get over.

“My game is something I’m always working on. We’ve worked very hard over the last three years to take the left side of the golf course out of play.

“Unfortunately how it’s gone the last few months every now and again you end up hitting a little pull when you’re trying to hit a fade and then you hit a couple in reaction to that which miss right.

“A lot of my stuff, the reason we do that is to protect the back – the fade movement helps with the pain on the back and helps me move without putting the back under too much stress.

“You are always trying to get better. Anybody who says they are trying to stay the same is lying. You’re always trying to get better and timing wise it’s just one of them things. Some days are better than others, some weeks are better.

“Unfortunately I’ve had a little spell where it’s not quite gone as good as the previous few months, but if you look at the previous few months before that it was almost impossible to keep it at that level.”

Willett’s fellow Englishman Tommy Fleetwood believes making the move from Masters spectator to competitor is the greatest accomplishment of his career, but has not ruled out managing something even better.

Three years after being just one of thousands of “patrons” at Augusta National as Bubba Watson won his second green jacket, Fleetwood is part of the 94-strong field contesting the first major of the year.

The 26-year-old was a lowly 188th in the world rankings at the start of September 2016, but winning the Abu Dhabi Championship in January and finishing second to world No 1 Dustin Johnson in the WGC-Mexico Championship have helped Fleetwood climb to a career-high 32nd.