The perfect storm
could it be reduced to two without rebellion? Maybe, maybe not.
What surely has to happen is that younger players are identified, picked out from the crowd and given extra help to make the transition from potential to actual achievement. We may be sure that the argument in favour of this is already being made by serious voices within a European Tour that is, sadly, a shadow of the one I used to follow.
Of course, two years is a long time. America’s best players may have a collective attack of the yips by 2023, Johnson might take up cricket and Wee Rory might rediscover the searing talent he once regularly unleashed. All things are possible, although I wouldn’t bet on it.
It is not that Europe must win in Italy, but they must be able to make a fight of it. We need a Ryder Cup that goes at least closer to the wire, not one where it is effectively over by teatime on Saturday. What is beyond question is that the Americans needed this victory, if only to reassure their fans that they could grind opponents into the dirt. Well, they have had their moment, but we now need to get back to being properly competitive.
The cards were always stacked in their favour this time round. They had home advantage, they had the better players who were in form and they had Whistling Straits, a brilliant match-play course that did not disappoint and where the ability to hit very long and straight was a hugely defining advantage. They also have the Presidents Cup every other year, where partnerships are forged or found to not work, where players get used to the team ethos and where captains can get used to leading from the front.
The importance of these matches against the Rest of the World cannot be exaggerated. Europe used to have the Seve Trophy but no longer. Could it be brought back? Is there a sponsor and would players earning their fortunes in America take a break from that merry-go-round to play in it? I am not optimistic about any of these things. Are you?
Meanwhile, the men could take a long look at how the admirable Catriona Matthew performed so brilliantly as captain to win the Solheim Cup a few weeks earlier. Here, too, there was a deeply partisan crowd and an American team apparently full of superior golfers. However, Europe’s Solheim women kept the crowd subdued by playing well, not exaggerating their celebrations when a tricky putt was holed and generally, almost quietly, getting on with it. With 4.5 points won out of five, Ireland’s Leona Maguire offered one of the year’s truly outstanding performances. They may not have had the stats on their side, but they somehow managed to generate self-belief. How? Maybe they will tell the next Ryder Cup skipper.
A turning point?
Mcilroy, meanwhile, may be key to any possible European revival in Italy. For some time now he has seemed a bit lost, a man who knew he had misplaced a big slice of his mojo but who, deep down, didn’t seem to care much. Only he knows if there is any truth in this thought, if his wealth and warm family life in Florida had blunted ambition, but, if so, this Ryder Cup may well have offered some sort of turning point.
Certainly his emotional, tear-filled interview at the end seemed to portray a man who realised what he had lost and wanted, really wanted, to find it again. Rory has never been a nearly man until recently, when those of us who thrilled to his skill and elan as he yomped through the old game’s highest plateau began to suspect a premature end to all that was promised.
Now, in that passionate response to his weary performance until the singles in this Ryder Cup we may be
beginning to glimpse a renewed determination to sort himself out. I hope so. This was a bad loss, but in Mcilroy, in Rahm and Garcia and Hovland, maybe Lowry, there is the nucleus of a proper side.
All they have to do is find the other seven. Their time starts now, because while it’s only a daft old game, it’s our daft old game and that’s enough of the thrashing stuff. Here’s to Rome and ’23. Ciao baby.