Pádraig Harrington: I'll stress about Ryder Cup loss but golf has been very good to me

Harrington has warned against a knee-jerk reaction and wholesale changes to the European qualifying system

Team USA captain Steve Stricker shakes hands with Team Europe captain Padraig Harrington

Pádraig Harrington confessed he will “stress” about seeing his brilliant Ryder Cup career sullied by a record defeat at Whistling Straits, but he warned against a knee-jerk reaction and wholesale changes to the European qualifying system.

The Dubliner had an old team that was thrashed 19-9 and with several players clearly out of form, there are question marks about the dual-band system that left the likes of Justin Rose and Alex Noren out in the cold as the captain had just three wild cards.

“Three years in golf is a long time,” Harrington said, recalling how Europe hammered the Americans 17½-10½ in Paris.

“It will be two years to the next Ryder Cup and you will see ebbs and flows in players in Europe as much as the US.

“No, I think we have had a good programme going forward, a good system. Every captain will have his own take on that.

“I certainly tried to get as much current form into the team; I think that’s important.

“But over a three-year period, it was tough. If it was two years, I would have had a different team.

“Victor Perez and Matthias Schwab probably would have qualified.

“In general, it has been working and don’t change what is not broken. I don’t think we need to panic; the core of the European team is strong. I think we should continue on. We don’t need to change the plan just yet.”

Harrington racked up four wins from six appearances as a player, but he admitted he will just have to take a record defeat as captain on the chin.

Asked if there will always be something lacking now, he said: “Absolutely, you get one go to be a winning Ryder Cup captain, and when you are not a winning captain, you’re not a winning Ryder Cup captain. It would be one of those things, it would be nice to have it, but that’s the reality of it.

“Golf has been good to me. I will stress about it and think about it, but in the bigger picture, golf has been very, very good to me.

“It will be something that will be a little spot on my career, but that’s the thing that you take on when you take on the captaincy.”

As he said in the team interview, conducted as ‘ We Are The Champions’ sounded for the celebrating Americans, he said: “It didn’t go right, but that happens in sport.

“Just remember, if you want to have these glorious moments, you’ve got to put your head out there, and sometimes it doesn’t go right and you get your head knocked off. That’s just the reality of sport.

“If you put yourself out there, you’ll have some miserable days, but also, if you put yourself out there, you’ll have those thrilling days when you win.”

As for his decisions over pairings and some surprise that Shane Lowry did not play a foursomes, Harrington was incredulous. “He was a rookie who got picked and lost 5&4 (sic, it was 4&3) the first day. We got him out there in the afternoon (on Saturday) and he got a win and he did a great job, so there didn’t seem to be very much logic in it.

“It was really good to get him back out there and keep his confidence up. A one ball foursomes the next day could have been a disaster, you know, get half a round of golf.

“The singles are very important, so getting him back out there, getting him that win in the afternoon was big for the team.

“Shane did an unbelievable job out there in the fourballs and I was thrilled with that. But as much as we love Shane in Ireland, he wasn’t jumping out ahead of anybody else to say ‘hey he should play four games’.”

Harrington expected Lowry to be good in the Ryder Cup but he admitted the Clara man exceeded his expectations.

“It was very special for me to have Shane; it really was,” Harrington said.

“He is a big-time player. To see how comfortable he is in the Ryder Cup, he looks to be far more comfortable than I ever was in these pressure situations, and I went on to win three Majors and play six Ryder Cups.

“I look at him and go, ‘wow, this is a guy who has done well, but he has a bright future in the sense of the bigger the occasion, the better he is’.”