Ryder Cup 2025: How Team Europe prepared for this year’s clash with Team USA at Bethpage Black unlike any past away contest | Golf News

This myth that Europe are great in the Ryder Cup and America are rubbish in the Ryder Cup is wrong. The reality is that both teams are great playing at home and both teams are poor on the road.

We’ve lost three of the last four away matches by an average of seven points. We just haven’t gone away from home and lost, we’ve got beaten comprehensively in three of our last four outings, so we’re doing things differently.

The first roll of the dice was to take back a captain who’d been there before. We felt it was a mistake going on the road with captains who haven’t done it before and are trying to learn the job, as well as dealing with the difficult challenge of playing away.

The second was data showing us that rookies don’t really perform away from home. It’s very difficult to play your first Ryder Cup in that environment, so having experience was important.

We had to create a qualification criteria that was going to give us the best chance of having experience, but also honour the DP World Tour and honour the fact that guys need to have a chance coming off the DP World Tour. I think we achieved that.

Edoardo Molinari [vice-captain] did an unbelievable job coming up with the points system, where we have 11 of the 12 players returning and two of those players on the team have qualified through the DP World Tour.

Rasmus Hojgaard is the obvious one, as he finished second in Dubai at the end of last year, won the Irish Open and earned most of his qualification points in DP World Tour events. The other is Tyrrell Hatton, who is obviously banned on the PGA Tour.

Hatton had to make his points either through majors or particularly playing in DP World Tour events, where he played great. I think we got a really good balance in the qualification criteria.

The third is the players’ communication and dealing with this cauldron of playing away from home. I think Luke Donald will talk about it more, but there’s been a huge amount of communication – the most they’ve ever had.

It has been regular communication in preparing them for the challenge, putting different ideas in front of them as to what we’re dealing with – how we’ve dealt with it in the past successfully and mistakes that we might have made in the past.

This is the most prepared team I’ve ever come across. We have come at this very differently from any away match we’ve come across away before.

Can extra details help Europe?

The Americans are obviously being paid to play Ryder Cup. Our players don’t want to be paid, but we are investing more money in this team than we’ve ever done before in terms of preparation and the detail that we’re going to is quite extraordinary.

The dietitians and our doctors already have been out there in Bethpage over the last six months, meeting with the chef and meeting with the people who are going to be making the food out there to share recipes, ideas and nutrition.

We’ve got our own gyms coming and our own equipment that the players are used to. They’re going to be fitted in to both the locker room in the clubhouse as well as in the hotel. Our physios have been out as well, so have extra days to tailor anything that they may need.

The preparation of going on this trip is something we’ve never done that before for an away match, with two and a half days together well in advance of the match. They played 27 holes, 18 on one day and nine on the other, with meetings in the evening times.

Luke shared ideas and partnerships with the players and went into some bigger details. It was also some bonding time with the players and caddies being together, wearing the same uniforms and all the stuff that goes with it.

It was a small group – we only had players, caddies, vice-captains, captain, me and maybe 10 people in the backroom team helping facilitate all that we did. I think we got a lot of bonding out of it and a lot of insights into the golf course, how it’s going to play.

Now the players have had a few days off. We’ve asked them to stay on East Coast time, so they’re not affected with the jet lag – something we haven’t done before. Everybody has gone back to their houses or taken a house in the Hamptons to play some golf and relax.

All this is quite detailed and I’m only touching the edge of the iceberg there. I can assure you we have gone to a lot of lengths that we haven’t done before – in terms of preparing this team – and taking on what we know is maybe going to be the toughest away challenge of all.

Will Europe be ready for ‘hostile’ crowd?

You can have all the vibe, you can have all of the nutrition, you can have all the gym work, the preparation – you can go wherever you want with all the detail, but the bottom line is can the players perform in a hostile environment?

We’ve tried to tailor the team to have players that are obviously in form but also experienced enough to take on this. Can our top players bring a massive haul of points? Because you win the Ryder Cup with top players.

If you take Viktor Hovland, Jon Rahm and Rory McIlroy in the last Ryder Cup, you’re looking at maybe 10 points between them. Then you only need four and a half points from the rest to get over the line, so the performance of big players wins the Ryder Cup and it’s the same on the American side.

Everything has been driven towards performance. Can you perform in the allocated time, which is an away Ryder Cup match? It’s not easy. There’s going to be a lot of shouting, a lot of roaring, maybe some personal insults thrown at you walking from green to tee.

Can you reset yourself? Can you drown out that noise and reset yourself and deliver in that hostile environment? Soccer players or rugby players are used to that, because they play in it every second week, whereas golfers aren’t.

Can Europe end home dominance?

If you were to put this Ryder Cup on neutral venue, you’d probably have even money both teams to win, but because it’s a home venue, the home team has obviously got a distinct advantage and are rightfully bookies’ favourites.

I think the United States were underprepared in Rome. They came over and they were having to deal with jet lag during the week and many hadn’t played a tournament for nearly six weeks. We’re making sure that we haven’t made those mistakes and given ourselves the best opportunity.

We’ve had some guest speakers from other sports come and speak about playing in a hostile environment, so we’re doing all we can to prepare the players mentally for what the challenge is.

We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves and we have a couple of ways of looking at this differently than we might have looked at it before. We’ve got an experienced team and now that we’ve seen the golf course, we’re aware of what the test is going to be like.

We have really worked hard behind the scenes. We think they’ll be well prepared and ready for what the challenge is going to be. Even if we don’t win, I’d like to think that we’re really going to close that gap in terms of points of losing, that we come really close to it.

It’s important that we step up and perform better away from home than we have done in recent times.

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When is the Ryder Cup live on Sky Sports?

There will be extended live coverage from every day of Ryder Cup week, starting on Monday September 22, where Team Europe look to regain the trophy with a historic away win in the United States.

Round-the-clock coverage of the opening day’s play will begin with live build-up from 9am on Friday September 26, ahead of full coverage from midday and the opening tee shot at 12.10pm. Not got Sky? Get Sky Sports or stream with no contract on NOW.