Padraig Harrington believes Lee Westwood can save him a selection headache when he considers his Captain’s pick for the European Ryer Cup Team after the Englishman played his way into automatic selection on the World Points list.
Westwood has enjoyed a stunning purple patch in his last seven events with a runner-up finish at the DP World Tour Championship earning him a third Race to Dubai title before adding two more runner-up finishes on the PGA Tour this month to move back into the top 20 of Official World Golf Ranking and into fourth spot on the Worlds Point List for Ryder Cup qualification.
“Yes, absolutely, these are the sort of things you want,” said the Ryder Cup Captain when asked if he feels good about Westwood’s form.
“You’d love to have experienced guys in the team who are playing well. You can’t just have an experienced guy for the sake of it. You want an experienced guy playing well, and it’s great to see Lee playing well.
“I will look at my team and look at the balance and certainly you would probably ask him to do a little more than just play golf that week, but I’m looking at it and I seem to be getting a nice balance so far. The majority of the people who are going to qualify automatically look like that side of my team is really taking shape.
“Obviously Lee playing his way in frees up another spot for a pick, which would help some of the senior guys because I do have a number of senior players who are unlikely to make the team automatically. So everything about Lee playing well is a bonus for me.”
Missing a leader
Harrington also revealed that he felt the European Team was lacking a player with Westwood’s leadership skills when Nick Faldo didn’t select Darren Clarke for the heavy defeat to the USA at Valhalla in 2008.
“The US were a better team, straightforward, on a golf course that suited them,” added Harrington, who was speaking to the media ahead of this week’s Honda Classic. “We didn’t gel very well together. I would have been a senior player there, with Lee Westwood and Miguel Angel Jimenez, but we didn’t really have a leader in the team room.
“I think maybe not picking Darren Clarke was one of the big mistakes of that Ryder Cup. You do need a personality in the team room. We didn’t have a Monty, so Darren would have done that job. I think if you look back, you could certainly look to that pick because it was a little bit missing in that team room.
“I had just won a couple of majors. I was too busy doing my own thing to be trying to take over that responsibility, and we were missing that for sure. We were missing a leader in the locker room. Whether it would have made a difference to the result? As I said, that seemed like a very strong US team.”
