I realised we weren’t going to win when there were people yelling on the 17th fairway

I realised we weren’t going to win when there were people yelling on the 17th fairway.” That Strange was alongside him then – “trying to pull Tiger through” – and not at the 18th where the destination of the Cup was being decided was telling Torrance refused to criticise Strange “Curtis was almost right,” he said. “It nearly came down to those last two matches but then the world No 2 got beat, didn’t he? I wanted to get my best players out early and get some blue on the board. I thought it was a plan that could work in any situation.”It was Phillip Price who beat Mickelson and when the team went into the main bar of the hotel on Sunday evening, Lee Westwood called up each player to accept an ovation. As Price was called, he told Westwood: “Tell them who I beat. Tell them who I beat.” Paul McGinley was another player to emerge from the shadows to join a long list of Irish Ryder Cup heroes. “I know I will be remembered for making the winning putt but it was a whole team effort,” McGinley said.Unlike Mark James at Brookline, Torrance had every faith in every member of his team.

Fittingly, in a week when the organisers took leave of their senses and officially designated it the Ryder Cup Matches – it’s a match – the winners were a completely united team rather than a collection of individuals.. Sometimes the simplicities we impose on our judgements of sport are rightly dismantled, if not cut into small pieces and thrown to the dogs. No doubt that is the proper fate of my submission here last week that if by some mischief of the gods the names of Colin Montgomerie and Tiger Woods were placed together in the final line-up of Ryder Cup action we should perhaps make a call to the League Against Cruel Sports. The vilification of the American captain Curtis Strange is surely a classic example. Those notorious twin impostors who attach themselves to victory and defeat were organising a lynch party on Sunday night.

That was maybe inevitable but it didn’t make the thinking behind it any less spurious.Strange is the goat of a Ryder Cup littered with heroes and rampantly revived as a spectacle of the highest quality – it has rarely been less than that – that does not necessarily have to descend to the manners of a rough bar-room in south Boston, Massachusetts.His decision to hold back his praetorian guard of Woods, Phil Mickelson and Davis Love III for the mopping up of a broken Europe rather than a frontal assault is being roundly condemned as one of the dimmest strategic moves since the French built the Maginot Line. It is of course another simplicity, another verdict that ignores the reality of the action.Europe won the Ryder Cup not because Sam Torrance out-thought and out-captained Strange, though in some ways that may well be true. Europe won because Montgomerie was immense, Phillip Price produced the round of his life against Mickelson, Bernhard Langer played from one of the most acute memories in all of sport, and Paul McGinley got up and down with extraordinary nerve on the last hole after playing a poor second shot. Take away any of those elements of the last day’s action, plus the doggedness of unfancied Europeans such as Niclas Fasth and Pierre Fulke, and Torrance would have been just another gambler who lost.Strange took it in the eye magnificently. His speech from the abyss of defeat was filled with grace and closed, magnificently, the book on the disfigurement brought by the appalling excesses of Brookline Country Club three years ago. Strange called his shots and they misfired, but he couldn’t go out on the course and play a shot, he couldn’t presume to tell major league golfers how to play the game as Seve Ballesteros did in Sotogrande five years ago and in the process made an ordeal for his players that somehow they survived.Even as McGinley was, perhaps just a little tackily, jumping in the lake, Strange was asked if he had got his strategy wrong. “Oh,” he said, “we are second guessing already.” But he insisted he would not have changed anything except, no doubt, the touch and resolution of some of his seven major tournament winners.

Strange’s disposition of his troops is being seen as a disaster but as Montgomerie and Scott Hoch went to the first tee on Sunday morning the American captain was running four points ahead of his immediate predecessors Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, and this after the first-day implosion of the world’s leading player.Woods was a headache for Strange – and a rather sullen opponent of the idea that the Ryder Cup, and a format so exquisitely pitched to draw every possible drama out of the three-day contest, inevitably captures the imagination of the game’s leading players. Woods’ disaffection appeared to be touching phobic levels by the end of the week, just as Montgomerie seemed endangered only by an overload of bliss.Where Ryder Cup reality settles between these two extremes is not the least fascinating question in the wake of Europe’s refusal to submit to an American team of vastly more experience and achievement Some were saying that this was Montgomerie’s major Another simplicity. Montgomery’s record in the Ryder Cup was already impressive and what he produced on Sunday, and the previous two days, was an extension of his reputation in team golf rather than any revelation. Bizarre as it may seem, Montgomerie finds the Ryder Cup a theatre of reassurance more than a challenge and to imagine that he will go to Augusta next spring emboldened by his slaying of the Americans has to be wishful thinking.