Determined Europe brace for lion's den of Bethpage

The preparation is over; the talking is finally done. Now Luke Donald's men must deliver the Ryder Cup while deflecting the abuse of a hostile US crowd

- Lawrence Ostlere

As Matt Fitzpatrick worked on his short game around the greens at Bethpage Black, a group of American fans saw an opportunity to get in his ear. They laughed at a couple of his duffed chips from the long grass and loudly predicted that he wouldn't be picked to play in this morning's foursomes by European captain Luke Donald.

“They were telling me, ‘Oh, you're probably going to be here [practising chipping] on Friday',” Fitzpatrick smiled. “I was like, 'Yeah, you're probably right to be fair.” They were wrong, as it turns out: Fitzpatrick will be thrown straight into the action in a new European pairing with Ludvig Aberg as the opening pairings were announced.

There is an awful lot of talk in the buildup to a Ryder Cup, patently too much talk. As rain poured down on the golf course yesterday, the final press conferences wandered off on strange tangents as the media tried to squeeze out yet more talking points. At one point, Viktor Hovland spent a good two minutes discussing his interest in UFOs.

Everything has been said, at least twice. There is little new ground to scrape over, partly because the European team is virtually identical to the one in Rome and the pairings will be similar too. So the questions kept coming back to one irrepressible theme. Europe won it at home. But can they win it away? Can they play to the same high level while a wisecracking New Yorker tells them they need a few shots of Ozempic, as Jon Rahm experienced during his practice round?

Each player will have to find their own way through a febrile atmosphere. Sepp Straka talked of getting lost in his routine and Bob MacIntyre said he would be dead-eye focused only on the one thing he could control, his golf swing. Others, like Fitzpatrick and Rahm, plan to embrace the American sense of humour and enjoy it.