Nothing wrong with Euro course

The real question is: why wouldn’t a team from Europe, representing the European Tour, have their home pitch playing like a European golf course?

Barely had they arrived at Golf National and stepped on the Albatros course, the usual grumbles from the Americans about course set-up started. Tight fairways, slow greens; an anti-bomber track.

There are maybe four holes on the course where using a driver off the tee is possible, much less advisable.

This is actually as usual; exactly the way the course plays for the annual Open de France. And a quick look down the list of former champions of that distinguished event shows the Albatros has never favoured outright bombers.

It doesn’t look like a traditional European golf course – like maybe Chantilly on the other side of Paris – because it’s a sort of “inland links”. But it plays like one.

Yet American selfobsession has it that this set-up arrangement is purely intentional, to skew the contest in Europe’s favour, take away the American power advantage and trick them with slow green speeds.

However, Golf National does not play like San Diego or Atlanta or Miami because it is none of those places and nor should it.

For their editions of the Ryder Cup recently, the US has slashed back the rough on usually tight courses like Hazeltine and Medinah with the rather meagre excuse that it wants to encourage birdies and “entertainment”.

The Ryder Cup, one imagines, will always do pretty well for entertainment without making challenging championship courses ridiculously easy.

The truth is the US is guilty of changing the nature of its venues for these matches far more than Europe ever does.

This week we have a European Tour course, for the team that represents that tour. It’s absolutely right and proper that it should be so.