Sarah Stirk
The dust has now settled on the 43rd Ryder Cup, which turned out to be a pretty chastening experience for all those involved with Team Europe. I’ll leave the postmortems to others, but one thing the events at Whistling Straits confirmed to me was just how remarkable an achievement winning the Solheim Cup had been three weeks previously.
The European women went into those matches in a similar position to the men, up against it in terms of both the world rankings and a lack of travelling support. Perhaps the crowd at Inverness Club was slightly less hostile than Wisconsin’s finest, but it still would have been a pretty lonely place for the European players.
I was just staggered by the way that team came together. I think they got their tactics spot on and really embraced the underdog mentality. The crowds were not quite on the scale seen at Whistling Straits, but there were 3,000 or so packed around the 1st tee, which is huge for the women’s game. The Europeans somehow managed to blank out the noise and pressure and went about their business in a low-key and calm fashion. This was a specific game plan to negate the crowd and not let the Americans build any momentum, and once they won the first session so convincingly, there was only going to be one winner for me. The home team just looked shell shocked and couldn’t energise themselves or their supporters.
Catriona Matthew deserves great credit for fostering this team spirit. The role of the captain is often overplayed in these events, but in Matthew’s case she deserves every bit of praise that has headed her way. It obviously helped massively that she was coming off the back of a victory at Gleneagles, but, as we know, an away Solheim Cup is a completely different prospect.
She captained in the same way she played – very cool, calm and level-headed, but with a steely determination and resolve. All the girls bought into this attitude and even when the result was confirmed, you didn’t see the wild celebrations often associated with these events.
No player epitomised this mindset more than Leona Maguire, who quietly went about amassing 4.5 points as a rookie. This again goes back to the confidence the leadership team instilled in the youngsters to go out there and deliver their best.
This was in stark contrast to Pat Hurst, who you could tell struggled to get the US team playing for her in the same way. She made a couple of questionable decisions and I’m not sure the Americans quite bought into her style. Too many of them played as individuals and didn’t have the passion and teamwork of the Europeans. It’s something that US Ryder Cup teams have suffered from in recent times, but which they emphatically banished at Whistling Straits. You can’t fake that camaraderie and this is something the US girls will have to try and put right for next time in Spain.
Europe’s next big challenge is to find a successor to Matthew, because she really will be a hard act to follow. The obvious candidate is Laura Davies, but she’s adamant she doesn’t want to do it. Having spoken to her about it, I think she’s put off by all the stuff that goes with the captaincy – the meetings, the speeches, the lead-up to the event etc. She’s been a vice-captain at the last couple and that’s a role she really enjoys. But she’s such a great ambassador for our game and I think she’ll have a lot of pressure put on her to now step up. She’ll kill me if she reads this, but I have a feeling she’ll succumb and take it on for 2023. If she does, Europe will be in the best possible hands to make it three in a row.
“Catriona Matthew will be a hard act to follow as Solheim Cup captain”