US Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley failed to deliver what he set out to do at the start of the week at Bethpage Black.
Bradley was full of confidence and positive vibes when he and his team arrived at Bethpage but he left the property on Sunday with many regrets after Europe won the 45th edition of the Ryder Cup.
The United States got off to the worst possible start when it emerged that Viktor Hovland would miss the singles matches due to a neck injury.
That meant that Europe had already secured a half point out of the three they needed to win the trophy before play even got underway, due to the ‘envelope rule’.
Bradley wants that particular Ryder Cup rule to be changed but it wouldn’t have made a difference even if Hovland did play and Harris English got the full point for the US.
After the fightback from the USA on Sunday, Bradley received support from some former players but the truth is that he made some horrendous decisions which cost his team the chance to win the Ryder Cup.
Keegan Bradley frustrated after what happened to Bethpage Black
It’s easy to criticise captains or coaches when their teams suffer defeat.
However, Bradley deserves much of the criticism currently being aimed at him.
What does the man himself think of his performance though?
He admitted that he made one very big error.
Bradley was asked about his decision to set up the course at Bethpage Black up in the way that he did.
He said: “We tried to set the course up to help our team. Obviously it wasn’t the right decision. I think anytime you’re the leader of a team or the captain or the coach, or whatever, we talked about this last night, you’re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don’t go well.
“I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition. For whatever reason, that wasn’t the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I’ve ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up.“
He was then asked if the data suggested that cutting the rough short was the way to go.
Bradley responded by saying: “We sat, or I did, and looked at a lot of info. We thought this was the best way to set the golf course up to win. You look at past Ryder Cups, and that’s kind of how it goes. You know, sometimes, you’ve got to make a decision on what to do, and you know, if I could go back, I probably would have changed that.
“But the Europeans played just incredible golf. Doesn’t matter how you set the course up when you play that well.“
Another contradictory comment from Bradley then it seems. Did his intuition tell him to set up the golf course differently or did he think cutting the rough so short that it was pretty much non-existent was the correct call?
Which one was it? The 39-year-old seemed out of his depth in the role as Ryder Cup captain. It seemed like an odd appointment from the start, and that notion has been proven right.
Keegan Bradley says whether PGA of America could’ve done more for him ahead of the Ryder Cup
Bradley was asked whether the PGA of America could have laid stronger foundations for his captaincy.
He said: “Well, first off, The PGA of America put me in an amazing position to succeed. They gave me every resource. They gave me every option. I had everything at my fingertips. This is no one’s fault but mine.
“When you are the leader of the team and you’re the coach, the captain, whatever you want to call it, and you lose, you have to take the blame. This is no one else’s fault. This is no one else’s, the PGA of America or whatever it is. Sometimes in sports, you go up against an opponent that sometimes beats you; they play better. And they played better than us. We gave it a great fight, that’s for sure.
“But everybody put me in the best position to succeed. It was a unique approach, and like I said, I had to learn on the fly. But I also had been on a lot of these teams, and I had the resources of all the vice captains and all the previous captains, as well, that helped me.
“I think the goal was to give the captaincy a fresh face, a different way to go about things. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. But we have some momentum going forward. I think we can continue down this road, and I’ll help out the best I can to help the next captain or the next whoever it is.“
Bradley then doubled down on the fact that he is solely to blame for the United States’ defeat at the Ryder Cup.
“I think in a lot of ways when you’re an away captain there’s a lot less decisions,“ Bradley explained.
“When you’re the home captain, you have to set the course. I wish I could have some of those decisions back. I definitely feel I made a few mistakes there, but it’s tough to tell that it’s going to rain before the Ryder Cup. It’s tough to tell sort of the way the course is going to be when we’re here. We didn’t want the greens to be like this soft. They were perfect. And the grounds crew did an incredible job.
“I’ve got to take responsibility for this outcome for sure.“
In fairness to Bradley, he has taken 100 per cent of the blame for America’s defeat at Bethpage Black.
That said, serious questions would need to be asked of him if he didn’t.
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