Ryder Cup losers escape Arsenal’s selfie glare
Aaron Ramsey, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain have all played a bit of golf in their time — God knows footballers have enough of it to spare — and the thought struck while flicking through social media last Sunday evening just what the Arsenal lads might have made of Justin Rose’s tweet.
Team Europe had just suffered its heaviest Ryder Cup loss in 35 years but Rose, team captain Darren Clarke and at least a dozen others thought it a good idea to pose for the sort of chirpy celebrity shot that, if you hadn’t followed events at Hazeltine over the weekend, would lead you to think they had just done rather well.
Underdogs arriving in Minnesota last week, a European team overburdened with competition rookies certainly contributed to another entertaining three days, but they lost by the sort of punishing margin that made the Ryder Cup an American dominion until Tony Jacklin determined to put one over the damn Yanks.
“We came as a team, leave as a team,” Rose tweeted.
We came as a team, leave as a team!!! @RyderCupEurope #TeamEurope #RyderCup 🇪🇺🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/bbb8nHbX7J
— Justin ROSE (@JustinRose99) October 2, 2016
Hmmm. The really astonishing side to all this was that no-one thought to have even a minor cut at them for it.
No-one thought to stop for a moment and ask if this was really the thing to be doing. The only note of discontent was struck by a suitably glum Rory McIlroy standing in the centre of the shot.
So, why do Team Europe’s golfers get a mulligan when Walcott, Ramsey, Oxlade-Chamberlain and seven other Arsenal players were panned for a similar picture at the Emirates last February after a Premier League game against Leicester City which, let’s not forget, they actually won?
“For me the key point was when we lost to Arsenal,” said Leicester’s Robert Huth. “Everyone was celebrating, they were doing selfies. Even though we were still top. A few of the lads stuck a few of those pictures up and it got the blood boiling. It gave us an extra yard in the next few games.”
No doubt about it, Arsenal’s improvised photoshoot lacked self-awareness and silverware but so did Europe’s.
Even vice-captain Sam Torrance, synonymous with some of the competition’s greatest days, was craning a neck to get in frame.
Pointing this out will be inevitably be dismissed by some as curmudgeonly, but these small details are pored over in awed and painfully nerdish detail before every Ryder Cup.
So, why not after it, too?
And can you imagine the shitstorm if the Americans had done that in defeat?
If Paul McGinley’s insistance on blue and yellow fish in the team room’s fish tank at Gleneagles in 2014 can be held up as a shining symbol of the efforts needed to win the thing then surely a picture like the one Rose took is at least suggestive of a flawed mindset that may have contributed to defeat.
“You gotta lose ‘em some time,” said baseball’s Casey Stengel. “When you do, lose ‘em right.”
Paul O’Connell was one of those drafted in to speak to the Europeans by Clarke, and in his autobiography, he has revealed how defeat to Wales at the 2011 Rugby World Cup prompted a day-long booze and junk food marathon to escape the disappointment.
It wasn’t something he was proud of afterwards but it encapsulated a more relatable reaction to high-stakes sporting defeat and it brought to mind the words of New Zealander John Mitchell after the England team he was coaching lost a game 76-0 to Australia on their infamous 1998 ‘Tour from Hell’.
“If I were an England player, I’d be hiding in my room this morning,” he suggested.
What that selfie last Sunday night told us was that, for all the undeniable drama and some magnificent golf, the Ryder Cup is a pre-packaged product of ersatz emotion.
How could it be otherwise? The golfing planet spins on unceasingly.
Half of Clarke’s side is already appearing at the Dunhill Masters and maybe individual athletes can’t be expected to process collective disappointment in the same way as sportspeople for whom the word ‘team’ isn’t such a disposable concept.
A younger, less measured McIlroy once dismissed the Ryder Cup as an “exhibition”. That argument was betrayed by his own extraordinary input last weekend but ultimately looked pretty much spot on in the moment captured by Rose just hours after defeat.
- Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie Twitter: @Rackob
