European Team Captain Padraig Harrington retains hope that his side will still face Steve Stricker’s Team USA at Whistling Straits this September.
The golfing world, much like the wider world, has been rocked by the Coronavirus that most recently saw the year’s second Major – the PGA Championship – postponed along with four regular main tour events.
Exactly what the future holds for golf is impossible to tell but with rumours circling around the fate of this year’s Ryder Cup on Tuesday, Harrington had the authority on this subject at least to set the record straight.
“September’s a long way off but there’s no change to the situation at all at this stage,” he told the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show on Today FM.
“I know there’s been a lot of rumours and they [Ryder Cup organisers] had to put up a statement to say there’s no change but there’s definitely no change.”
“For once, I’m on the inside of these things,” he laughed. “You’re normally looking at something and it’s some anonymous source says this and now that I’m on the inside ,I’m like ‘woah, it really is made up stuff’.
“You know, if somebody had the power today to tell you what they’re going to be doing in September, I mean… wow.
“There was a big announcement from the PGA Tour about events being cancelled in May and the PGA Championship being postponed but that’s as far as they’ve got – they’ve taken steps to the middle of May at this stage.”
On Tuesday the Telegraph in the UK led with the headline – ‘Ryder Cup set to be postponed until 2021 due to coronavirus crisis’ sending twitter into meltdown as golf fans across the globe lamented their schedule being decimated even further after the PGA Championship followed the Players Championship and the Masters in dropping off the schedule.
Thankfully the Telegraph’s piece was premature and although months of planning goes into staging a Ryder Cup, the fate of this year’s biennial contest has yet to be decided.
Questions will naturally turn to team qualifying requirements and the merits behind such systems should this situation rumble on much longer but for now, let’s just hope we’ll still have something to look forward from a golf point of view over the coming weeks.
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