Keegan Bradley said that the United States team would not deviate from its plan and have kept seven of its eight players from the Ryder Cup foursomes on Friday in the alignment on Saturday morning.
Justin Thomas reveals himself after playing both foursomes and Fourball for the American team Friday at Bethpage Black, but the stars in difficulty Scottie Scheffler and Bryson Dechambeau will return to the first TEE on Saturday with the Europe Ahead 5 1 / 2-2 1/2 team.
Scheffler and Dechambeau – which combined for six major championships and four of the last eight – went handlighted 0-4-0 Friday.
Dechambeau, who played Foursomes with Thomas and lost 4 and 3, was twinned with Cameron Young, from New York, to face Ludvig Aberg in Sweden and Matt Fitzpatrick of England at the first time of TEE on Saturday.
Scheffler and Russell Henley will remain together after an uninteresting defeat against 5 and 3 against Aberg and Fitzpatrick. They will play the anchor match Saturday morning against Robert Macintyre of Scotland and Viktor Hovland of Norway.
Bradley has also kept together Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele – a tandem veteran responsible for the only quartet of the Americans so far – and Collin Morikawa and Harris English, who are analytically the weakest possible combination of the American team, according to the advanced metrics of the Data Golf website.
Morikawa and the Englishman will get another crack at the Rory McILroy in Northern Ireland and Tommy Fleetwood in England after this pair made them defeat 5 and 4 on Friday. Schauffele and Cantlay will compete against the Spaniard Jon Rahm and the English Tyrrell Hatton.
The European tandems of McILroy / Fleetwood and Rahm / Hatton are each 3-0-0 in the quartet, going back to the Ryder Cup 2023.
The first Captain Bradley declared and reaffirmed his position that it is preferable for Americans to stick to their plan.
“We are not going to panic and make this kind of mistakes. We will respect what we know,” said Bradley. “We have a lot of self -confidence.”
Scheffler had a day to forget. Playing with JJ Spaun in Fourball, he did not win a hole, missing the fairways at n ° 1, 2, 6, 7 and 11 and the green in the 14th par-3. His first birdie did not come to the No. 15, that Rahm was equaled a few moments later to cancel all hope of a return.
It was the fourth time that a world No. 1 has lost two games from the opening Ryder Cup. Ian Woosnam (1991) and Tiger Woods (1999, 2002) were the others.
“When you are the n ° 1 player in the world, you have a day that it may not have been the best, normally you bounce back. We are not worried about Scottie Scheffler. He was in a great mood in the team room. He can’t wait to come back tomorrow.”
Pressed on the duo Morikawa / English, Bradley said that it was both an intestinal feeling and the internal analyzes of the team that led him to keep them together.
“They were really disappointed that they lost their match today. They were impatient to come back to the course, and that is why we did it,” said Bradley.
Donald has the luxury of returning 11 of the 12 players who won the Ryder Cup under his captain in 2023.
“I have to give a lot of credit to Edoardo (Molinari),” said Donald. “I think that he has turned the statistics so much. Probably among all the vice-capitaine, he is the one to whom I speak the most just because he really has a large part of our strategy and how we go about the association, the orders. He is very attentive to this kind of things. Yes, it is a great asset for me.”
–Adam Zielonka, media of land level
