Rival skippers buoyed by positive weekend exploits

RIVAL captains Corey Pavin and Colin Montgomerie had good reason to be pleased at how the final tournaments before the Ryder Cup panned out over the weekend.

Montgomerie would have kept an anxious eye on the Vivendi Cup in Paris even though only one of his team was involved. The man involved was by far the most controversial of his three ‘wild card’ selections, our own Pádraig Harrington, a golfer desperately in need of a morale-boosting performance after a disappointing season for the three-time major winner.

And for two particularly uninspiring days, it hardly looked likely to happen. Although he bagged a series of birdies, they were more than offset by a triple bogey, a double bogey and a number of other dropped shots.