WHETHER he's surrounded by friends or those who view him through more sceptical eyes, the only criterion which will move Colin Montgomerie's thinking when he assembles Europe's team to face the USA at Celtic Manor next year is the challenge of retrieving the Ryder Cup from American hands.
A proven winner in his own right, Monty needed all his resilience over the past four years to mend fences broken in the aftermath of a rules incident at the Indonesian Open. It was a measure of how he retrieved his reputation that the same jury of pe
ers who hauled him over the coals in 2005 chose him unanimously on Wednesday as Europe's captain in Wales.
Few have fallen as low as the Scot did in the aftermath of "Jakartagate" when he forgot to mark the position of his ball during a storm and made an inaccurate guess the following day as to where it should be placed.
As with so much else in his career, Monty re-built his reputation at the Ryder Cup. It was notable this week that Darren Clarke, who has not been close to the Scot in recent years, was among those who endorsed the appointment. "He's got an incredible record in the Ryder Cup; he's been the Ryder Cup talisman for many years," observed the Ulsterman. "He'll be very player-orientated; he'll take a keen interest in how the players are doing. The fact that he'll be captaining the tour, playing in the team will be an added bonus."
As with any team, there will be some who qualify for Celtic Manor who like the Scot and some who don't. All, though, will respect his achievements against the Americans.
In truth, there have been plenty of victorious European Ryder Cup sides in the past where some of the players had issues with the captain or members of his backroom team. But for a week, even adversaries can put their differences aside to support a common cause. With Jose Maria Olazabal and Thomas Bjorn, if he doesn't qualify as a player, set to add ballast to the Scot's backroom team in Wales, Montgomerie knows Europe will close ranks and he'll be spoiled for choice when it comes to wild cards.
As for the preferred selection process for the Ryder Cup team, Monty has never hidden his view that the ideal system would be to give the captain 12 picks and simply eliminate the qualification element.
In recent years, five European players have qualified from the world points list and five through their positions on the Race to Dubai. One of the economic arguments in the past against increasing the number of captain's picks was the need to maintain the viability of the European Tour as an attractive arena for the world's best players. To a large extent, the substantial injection of funds brought about by the Race to Dubai has minimised the need to use the Ryder Cup as honey to lure the bees away from the riches on offer in America.
Perhaps more so than ever before, the European Tour can decide on a qualification process best suited to providing Montgomerie with the strongest possible team, and Monty is sure to argue that upping the captain's input on selections would help to provide a better balance between youth and experience.
"The next full committee meeting will be in Ireland in May," the Scot confirmed, "and the qualification process of the team will be on the agenda. I don't want to get into a stage of panicking because we lost the Ryder Cup. There is no need to panic, but that will be on the agenda in May."
The full article contains 622 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
