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I’m not thinking about whether this will be my last Ryder Cup as a player … it would only add pressure when I

Matt Majendie Sports Correspondent LEE WESTWOOD EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

EVERY sensibility points towards victory for the United States come Sunday.

Eight of the American team are in the world’s top 10, while captain Steve Stricker has the advantage as home captain of widening the fairways for his long-range drivers and setting fast greens for strong putters.

In addition, under the travel restrictions there will be an absence of European supporters. And yet the Ryder Cup has the ability to flip any statistic or advantage on its head — think Europe’s four-point deficit going into the singles in 2012 and the subsequent Miracle in Medinah.

As Lee Westwood (below) puts it: “All the statistics that people take week in, week out as individuals, this is a completely different week where we’re a team. The numbers go out the window.”

Westwood is living proof. At 48, he is the oldest member of the European team for nearly a century. Speaking from the back of a golf buggy basking in victory as one of Thomas Bjorn’s vice-captains at the last edition in 2018, he told me he planned another stint at the vice-captaincy before leading the team on their return to home soil.

“After 2018 when I did the vice-captaincy I didn’t really look at 2020 as it was going to be and think that I was going to play,” he said. “But I’ve never really paid too much attention to making Ryder Cup teams so I look more to the short-term goals that get you there.”

Even alone, Westwood is a Ryder Cup institution. Only Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Sergio Garcia and Colin Montgomerie boast more than his 23-point tally and, when he made his event debut in 1997, current team-mate Viktor Hovland was just 10 days old.

He jokes of his ageing achievement,

“well, that’s another record!” but it has taken his mind back to playing a 50-year-old Jay Haas in Detroit in 2004 and thinking that was some achievement.

In all likelihood, this will probably be his last time as a player before, most likely, turning his mind towards succeeding Padraig Harrington as captain.

“After this week and up to January I’m going to have to have conversations with myself and people around me as well as people at the European Tour about what the next couple of years holds,” he said.

“I’m not thinking about it too much because it serves no real purpose for my performance here. If you put a timeframe on things and say that’s the last one it adds pressure when you don’t need it. Is it my last one? I don’t know, so there’s no point looking at it.”

Should this be the Ryder Cup playing farewell, it would be some way to go out with another win on American soil — he has already achieved the feat twice: in Detroit in 2004 and again with

Medinah. “Picking a favourite Ryder Cup is like lining up your kids and picking the one you like the most,” he said. “But that last day in Chicago is the most memorable day I’ve had at a Ryder Cup.

“I remember most moments from that day. It was obviously a very special comeback and a very special moment in sport, not just golf, although I’m not sure I’d want to repeat going into the singles again four points behind.”

For all the statistics against them, Europe have a unity that numerous American captains must have longed to replicate. In contrast, the Americans are doing a good job of unsettling themselves. Brooks Koepka made out that playing the Ryder Cup was an unwanted annoyance, while his fractious relationship with Bryson Dechambeau will continue to be a talking point.

Westwood tries initially to play a straight bat at the suggestion that unrest will hinder the American cause but can’t quite help himself.

“We can’t as a European team do anything about what they do,” he said. “What they do is up to them. It can’t help though, can it? We’ll just let them do their thing.”

Already going into the week, Westwood as the old head has been acting as a sounding board for Europe’s three rookies. What he brings is not just in terms of his play and nous on the golf course but what he can give in the team room, where there are plans to play reruns of the four previous wins on American soil.

Having been part of half of them, Westwood is living proof of how it’s done. As for achieving No5 — “Oh yeah, I’m very confident,” he says.

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2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

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