Lee Westwood slip-ups turn heat on captain Darren Clarke

Rory McIlroy said he needed a paracetamol after a raucous Saturday’s play in the cauldron that was Hazeltine National but you got the feeling that Darren Clarke had the bigger headache because of his underperforming captain’s picks.

That Europe was faced with clawing back the third biggest deficit in Ryder Cup history at 9½ to 6½ down, and the United States would go into the Sunday singles matches with all the momentum behind them after winning Saturday night’s fourball session was in large part down to Clarke’s players’ failure to convert neutral or winning positions into points.

If the Europeans’ ‘Miracle at Medinah’ was inspired by anything four years ago in the Chicago suburbs, it was the fightback sparked by Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia and finished off by Ian Poulter, and a virtually redundant playing partner in McIlroy, that rescued a dire situation and transformed it into merely a perilous one.