AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE

Bill Elliott looks back on the USA’s dominant performance in the 43rd Ryder Cup and asks what Europe can do to ensure the biennial contest doesn’t become one-sided going forward

- Bill Elliott

It began with the Europeans wearing daft cheesy hats but it ended with them standing around with egg on their faces, Rory McIlroy adding genuine tears of remorse. Somewhere, a scratchy violin was playing a lament. This wasn’t a defeat, it was a thrashing. At 19pts to 9, it was, of course, a record win for the USA, the widest margin of victory since continental European golfers joined the old one-sided rumble in 1979. It also wasn’t a great surprise.

Even a cursory glance at the relative merits of the opposing players going into this 21st edition of the modern matches suggested that, if the Americans hit both form and the ground running, the power advantage of this new-look side would prove too much. What few of us anticipated was the nervenibbling extent of their collective superiority over those three days in Wisconsin.

I have seen big wins before, but not quite like this. What I have never seen is a European team so nervously shellshocked that it took until Saturday afternoon’s fourball matches for some glimmer of steely resistance to emerge. Until then they appeared a group suffering trauma. Timid doesn’t quite capture the apparent mood as their opponents outdrove them and then outputted them on greens that swayed this way and that, adding extra speed to the bumps as the weekend wore on.